Water in contemporary art is both an ingredient and an environment of existence. This is no longer about the traditional aquatic motif in painting or literature. We are talking about sculptures in public spaces, underwater art projects, changing installations.
Few things are more global and at the same time more close to us than our bodies of water,” wrote Astrida Neimanis, a cultural historian as well as a lawyer and editor of the journal Environmental Humanities. In areas of scientific research, such as blue humanities or blue cultural studies,the language of describing the modern world is subordinated to water as a scientific category. It thus brings to life the celestial metaphors of cultural seepage and efflux, but also returns to its life-giving manifestation with all bodily tides. As you can see, scientific theories are capable of bearing many interpretations.
It can be said that vaudeville broke into the halls of academia, but it was already present in contemporary art. For many years, artists have been engaged in a dialogue of art with water, which co-creates their projects and even becomes the environment of its existence and art in itself.
Crosby beach
Let’s move near Liverpool, where the work of British sculptor Antony Gromley is located on Crosby Beach. The installation, titled AnotherPlace, stretches along 3.2 km of shoreline between the villages of Waterloo and Blundellsands and weighs a total of about 650 kg. It consists of 100 arbitrarily placed iron sculptures depicting people facing the sea.
Each of the statues is 1.89 meters long and is carved in the likeness of the author, or more precisely, reflects his naked body, which has sparked moral controversy, while also helping to boost tourism. Another Place has previously played host to Germany’s Cuxhaven Beach, Norway’s Stavanger and Belgium’s De Panne. However, the author found that the ideal conditions provided by Crosby and the Irish Sea coast and in 2007 received permission to create a permanent exhibition at the site.
From an artistic perspective, water has been in dialogue with metal sculptures all these years. With the tides, the panorama of the installation changes: some of the figures resemble people who have stopped as they enter the water, others look at the setting sun from land drained by the tide. The unconnected statues are corroding and seem to be wracked with living marine microorganisms. They stand still, suggesting human impotence in the face of time and water, which, like all of nature, does not need humans to live.
Topography of tears
The second facet of aquatic contemporary art is to make water an art in itself. American visual artist Rose-Lynn Fisher looked at the water flowing out of people’s eyes. This is how it was created in 2017. Topography of Tears project.
Tear is otherwise known as tear fluid that moisturizes and cleanses the corneas and conjunctiva of the eye. It has a certain chemical composition: it is mainly water, but also a bit of salt (sodium chloride), proteins and antibacterial substances. Physiologically speaking, it has a protective function. However, the artist went a step further, and her emotional motivation for doing so was the death of a friend in 2008. From then on, regardless of the cause of her own tears, she began collecting samples of them, which she then imaged under a microscope and photographed with a camera that magnified the image a hundred times.
In this way, the art and research project transformed into a poetic approximation of the physiological, chemical structure of human tears as a reflection of feelings that are complex, though beautiful. The inner world ceased to be merely metaphorical, for the water flowing out of the eyes formed images of concrete emotions under Fisher’s microscope. One of the biggest advantages of this art, according to the author, is that the image can support the process of naming a particular emotion, and this is important in times when it can be difficult for us to define what we actually feel.
The photos taken as part of the Topography of Tears project seem to be maps of individual feelings: grief, sadness, overwhelm, joy, elation. All of them have a characteristic mosaic, leading line in a distinctive way, which gives them individuality and meaning. Emotions speak in images – water coming from the human body.
Underwater gallery
A different artistic concept guided the Viennese photographer and diver, who in 2010. prepared an underwater exhibition and titled it SinkingWorld. Andreas Franke, as he is referred to, began with a presentation of photographs showing ordinary life. They were displayed in the space of the wrecked US military ship Vandenberg, standing off the coast of Florida. What’s unusual about these photos is that everyday activities, such as playing ball or hanging laundry, are superimposed on the background of the underwater world.
This first underwater art exhibition, placed 35 meters below the water’s surface, was visited at the time by approx. 10 thousand. divers. The photos were placed between two layers of plexiglass. They were attached with large magnets in steel frames and then sealed with silicone. Despite this, it has not been possible to protect them from environmental impacts. Underwater conditions affected the surface of the photos, and sea salt left a mark on them, which in the art world only added to their stature and uniqueness. It was perceived as if underwater nature participated in the creative process.
Andreas Franke is undoubtedly an artist with a vision, engaging the fairy tale art of imagination in favor of ecological action. He continued his activities, creating, among other things. a series of rococo-style photographs on display as part of an underwater exhibition prepared on the Greek freighter Stavronikity, sunk near the Caribbean island of Barbados. The exuberance of rococo costumes depicted in the photos, the abundance of their form contrasted with the scenery of the turpish scrap of the ship gave a strongly surreal effect. The underwater, aquarium-like background of the photograph transports the viewer into a world of magical realism. Besides, the author himself on his website admits: I want to draw the viewer into an unreal and strange world. Ordinary scenes from the past play out in a fictional space and begin to belong to a dream world in which one can lose oneself or with which one can identify.
Water in this artistic project takes you into another dimension of art, it becomes an integral part of the exhibition: it is not the background of the photos, but literally fills the entire artistic space. How unusual must be the silence of such an underwater gallery, where diving visitors, without phones or conversations, are focused only on what they see.
Priceless water in art
Art people have made water one of their important subjects and a tool for their work. The context of the climate crisis and the Anthropocene epoch is not irrelevant here. Involving contemporary art in efforts to improve water quality and climate can also be a very lucrative activity. It can be said that artists who have appreciated water are sometimes generously appreciated by their audience.
An extreme example of this is Yayou Kusama, a Japanese political activist and avant-garde performer. The 95-year-old artist is now referred to as the Princess of dots because of the obsession evident in her work. One of her acclaimed works is the installation Fireflies on theWater. It is a small room that can accommodate only one person. Inside, the room is lined on all sides with mirrors, and you can walk there a piece on a platform, at the end of which you can see water, like a puddle on the floor. The whole is illuminated by 150 small lamps hanging from the ceiling. With mirrors and water, the lights multiply endlessly, creating a dazzling effect.
New York’s fine arts museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, recommended this installation in 2012, inviting viewers to transcend their own sense of self. It’s fair to say that losing one’s sense of self can be threatened by browsing the amounts at which Kusama’s works are priced. On average, she sells her works for around $5 million, although there are times when a single object reaches a price of $10 million, or 40 million zlotys.
A perverse viewer of contemporary art, having seen the installation Fireflies on the Water, might say that in Warsaw alone we have two places that offer similar experiences in dark rooms with multiplied spotlights: these are the World of Illusions Museum and Cosmos Museum. Is it just artistic inspiration? Is the hand of a prominent artist necessary to experience a profound artistic experience? And do artists, using water as a tool for contemporary art, have to be unequivocally classified as committed? You can look for your own answers to these questions. What is certain, however, is that progressive negative climate change will make contemporary art increasingly aquatically engaged.
Photo. main: Alice Alinari/Unsplash