If, like me, you were one of the 9.5 million people who managed to sit through the stilted BBC docudrama, Pompeii: The Last Day, on Monday night, you won't need reminding that Mother Nature is not the placid lady we often take her for.
If catastrophic events, from ash clouds to molten lava, can manage to despatch Tim Pigott-Smith and a whole host of usually immortal British character actors, the moral seemed to be, then the rest of us had better watch out. The programme ended (as does every show on sensational science subjects from shark attacks to giant asteroids) with a warning that it might happen again.
You might be forgiven for thinking it already had, according to two new Glasgow exhibitions, After Nature at the CCA and Storm at the Gallery of Modern Art, which take threatened and threatening nature for their starting point.
The first of these shows, After Nature, brings together three films from Claire Langan, Duncan Marquiss, and Rachel Reupke, which explore the notion of the sublime: nature as grand and terrifying, yet somehow beautiful, because of the sensation of awe it provokes. The Sublime was largely an eighteenth-
century invention, a time when by no coincidence volcanoes and, particularly the notorious Vesuvius, became a fashionable subject of research.
Pompeii seems to be the explicit model for Claire Langan's Glass Hour, whose moody, post-apocalyptic films have recently shown at the
Liverpool Biennale and Glasgow's Tramway. Glass Hour shows a figure moving through a blasted and molten landscape of abandoned homes and industrial installations, surrounded by smoke clouds and, apparently, lava flows.
The implication would seem to be that we are witnesses
to some contemporary environmental catastrophe rather than a historic one. And the technical trick is that Langan has created the scenario with on-site special effects and clever locations rather than post-production trickery. It's a rather lovely film, if a little one-dimensional, and for sheer
sensation, a lot more evocative than the computer-modelled moments of the BBC's big-
budget special.
Duncan Marquiss's charming film, shown this year at Venice, toys with sensation and then draws back from it. Shot in a series of dramatic Highland landscapes, with a soundtrack of music by the artist himself, he sets up a grand narrative of smoky glens and brooding forests and then lets things drift. There's drifting rubbish in his wooded lochs, and his forests turn out to be commercial rather than primeval. We want the sublime, he seems to say, but we can't always get it.
From Thursday, nature is in the hands of two canny devotees at the Gallery of Modern art. Matthew Dalziel and Louise Scullion have always embraced a slightly more quizzical view of the sublime. Their films, public art works and installations often set off spectacular beauty with the prosaic nature of the lived-in landscape. They are the artists behind The Horn on the M8 and Modern Nature, a solar-powered, hi-tech sculpture in the Tyrebagger forest near Aberdeen, which looks like
a series of mobile phone masts but sounds like a group of capercailies.
Currently working from Dundee University, they spent many years working from
St Combs, a coastal village north-east of Aberdeen and, says Louise Scullion, the unique, slow pace of their recent work reflects the different pace of rural life.
For Storm, they have created a rotating series of slide pro-jections and sound pieces for the ground floor gallery at GoMA, exploring the envi-
ronmentalist John Muir's description of nature as ''a storm of energy, eternally flowing from use to use, from beauty to yet higher beauty''. Each day will see a single landscape image on show, and a voice describing, in elaborate detail, the ecology and the geology
of the scene.
While some of the landscapes may be familiar, they will not be named. ''We really wanted a kind of universal landscape,'' explains Scullion. ''To look at the kind of choreography of different events, you are looking at a tiny little flower in the foreground, but also at this big geological landscape.''
The artists, having been working with ecologist Dr Hugh Ingram, say that for all its beauty and apparent romanticism, Storm is in many ways a more clinical, objective work.
''It almost gives a kind of godly view of the world,'' says Scullion, ''of having spent millions of years just gazing upon this one place, having the memory of when ice ran across it, water ran under it, the force of the water creating these shapes. With the voice we have recorded you can imagine all the different scenarios.''
In Dalziel and Scullion's universe, the god they have chosen is female. She describes nature as a thing of flux and volatility, as the people of Bay of Naples learned to their cost.
Even with this gentle, scientific work there is an apoca-
lyptic implication, created by
a certain tension in the pre-sentation. Just like Pompeii: The Last Day, the slide show we see may well be set in the future, describing a past world now obliterated.
After Nature is at the CCA, Glasgow until November 30. Storm is at the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow from October 30 to March 7.
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