Susan Peterson
Twentieth-century city dwellers have stopped trying to answer a question that was a major preoccupation of 19th-century thinkers: How should humanity’s relationship to the natural world be conceived? Ralph Waldo Emerson and his cohorts argued that man’s intelligence is primary and that natural history proceeds from that, while the proponents of natural philosophy suggested the opposite–that nature was the foundation and source through which intelligence could be examined. But both ideas depend on an unbreakable connection between man and the natural world in which neither is subsumed or contained by the other.
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Adherents to the idea of an inviolable, mutually sustaining connection can be found scattered throughout American literature and philosophy of the 19th century, but the paintings of the period tell a different story, a story of domination, confusion, even terror. In most of these American landscapes an awesome nature dwarfs minuscule figures and structures beneath stormy clouds or piercing sunlight; the paintings can hardly be said to picture a harmonious relationship. But man’s connection to the natural environment was in many ways a philosophical tradition that couldn’t quite withstand the crush of 20th-century urbanism and industrialism. Today our puzzled attempts to come to terms with nature seem relevant only on days when the lake looks particularly fearsome, or when clouds overtake the top of the Sears Tower, or when a white-knuckle midwestern thunderstorm sweeps in ahead of the local news, whose green scabs on the Storm Tracker change any sort of immediate experience to a visual, sanitized version of “the weather.”
Peterson’s “North Atlantic Storms and Hurricanes” series artfully combines and expands upon the experiences suggested by the other works: the centerpiece of the exhibit, it’s the site where Emerson reconciles with the local weatherman. In some 15 pencil works Peterson has mined the massive body of meteorological information in Tropical Cyclones of the North Atlantic Ocean, 1871-1995, a compilation of the paths of hundreds of storms that have run into North America over the past century, retracing in pencil on tracing paper the paths of storms brought together by some whimsical, art historical, or personal connection. Thus we find a tracing of six storms with the same name, a tracing that includes one storm from every year in the life of John Cage, and a tracing of the 788 storms that have occurred since the birth of Willem de Kooning. The 13 storms to have hit Robert Rauschenberg’s birthplace–Port Arthur, Texas–since 1871 have been erased.
