Wondrous Artifacts
Kevin O'Connell takes a dispassionate eye to our flailing green energy dreams.
By Collier White
I meet a friend in Denver to stay at his parents’ house for a few days. We’ve both flown a great distance, and on the day we arrive, his grandfather dies, expectedly. As he and I drive away from the tent city of Denver International Airport, imperceptibly gaining altitude as we traverse the twenty-five miles to the skyline, I look out across the dusty plain and wonder about the familiar but unpleasant quality of the sky. He and I went to high school in Colorado, but have since left the Rockies to drift East: Tuscaloosa, Minneapolis, New York. Scanning the hazy, light blue sky, I’m remembering that there is a pervasive hostility to eastern Colorado, a matter-of-fact indifference to human life. “Is it something about the thinner atmosphere up here?”
A kind of reply comes days later: “I could move back here,” he says. “Except for that sky.”
With August heat rising from the plains, the airport looks like an Arabian oasis on the undifferentiated slope between the mile-high city and Nebraska. The semi-arid climate, the dusty terrain, and the complete lack of shade combine to create real danger. Dropped into the middle of this dry prairie without the slings of highway and boomeranging traffic from Denver, Boulder and Fort Collins, one could quickly die under the big sky. Eastern Colorado and Nebraska don’t have the dramatic contours of the Rocky Mountains, but they are every bit as wild.
The Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver is currently hosting massive expanses ofProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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his sky in the photographs of Kevin O’Connell, in an exhibition entitled Everything Comes Broken. It’s a sky that seems to recede from objects. It can flatten them, and it can make them look vulnerable, and O’Connell uses it well. He places the horizon at the midline of his compositions or below, emphasizing the isolation of his subjects. The wind farm, its attendant furnishings and transmission lines look exposed and forgotten, like toys left outside.
O’Connell is an attorney and civil engineer whose attention to wind farms comes as a kind of riposte to the myth of green energy. Images of these windmills are, by now, ubiquitous, so it is a great accomplishment that these photographs make them look new, stripping away romanticism while leaving their beauty intact. In corporate literature, leaflets and billboards, windmills are symbols of responsible development; their ethereal beauty and putative silence reflects an angelic regard for the wilderness. Windmills are perceived – even by some of the same naturalists who reflexively oppose oil drilling in Alaska, for instance – as enhancements to the landscape: the benign leashing of nature’s free energy.
But O’Connell is not buying it. In the title of the exhibition, Everything Comes Broken, he refers to the exploitative economic system into which these new inventions enter. In his photographs, the windmills jut from landscapes that look twice evacuated. First, they are cleared by the conquering man who has groomed away all flora and fauna, and then they are deloused of our own species, as though we view the windmills from a post-apocalyptic vantage point.
As a child in the San Francisco bay area, I prized family trips that took us past oil wells along the state highways. The rhythmic motion of the pumpjacks looked like robotic donkeys eternally saluting the sun. Their movement was majestic and a little bit sad – they made me nostalgic for a time I didn’t remember. To my mother, the oil fields were a blight, a landscape saturated with the politics of greed, failed energy policy, and a disregard for the environment. The irony – that we were applying our reasoned insults and ignorant appreciation from the safety of a passing automobile – was completely lost on me.
Kevin O’Connell projects himself into an aesthetic future where he can reproduce the wind farms dispassionately, not as desired tokens of responsible energy policy, but as a series of sensory experiences, as artifacts that have permanently altered the landscapes of the future. In his artist’s statement, he says that he doesn’t intend to pass judgment on the wisdom of wind energy, but to invite the windmills into an arena of pure aesthetics. They are wondrous, but they are like Ziggurats, a grand gesture to the gods of our known universe.
O’Connell’s photographs render the windmills with astonishing size and grandiosity. They are simultaneously flattened and abstracted – at times they seem like paper cutouts against the sky – and astonishingly corporeal. Here, a service door provides the height of a man measured against the colossus. The photographs invite an immersion that is furthered by a video exhibition. In a small gallery, three walls are covered with projections of three vistas from a wind farm. The sound of the windmills thunders over a loudspeaker. Only one of the screens actually shows a windmill in full. The others show only blue sky and the mottled tan steppe-shrub prairie, saturated in that stark light and swept periodically by the shadow of a turbine.
O’Connell’s exhibition, without any polemic, crystallizes an anxiety about our piecemeal and symbolic energy policy. More poignantly than any jeremiad, it turns the littered landscape of today’s energy policy into the artifact of a doomed culture. During my weekend in Denver, I spend some time going through the grandfather’s tools: a lifetime’s clamps and saws and wrenches are separated into piles that represent the branches of a family tree. These piles will then suffer further entropy. I think of the windmills invading the wild like an army of headstones: dead monuments to humanity’s last stand against a resurgence of wildness that is as near as climate change, a massive, near religious offering to a planet prepared to shrug us off.
Kevin O’Connell – Everything Comes Broken
Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver
Closes Sunday, October 4, 2009.
Images: A Series of Untitled prints by Kevin O’Connell, 36″ x 48″.
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