Heide Museum of Modern Art

Weeds

Last year while attending a symposium on the theme of Art and the environment at the Slade School of fine art in London, I was surprised to hear one of the speakers the artist Simon Read to bring about the difficulties he has had in his work when dealing with the law. His point was, lawyers, today having to argue issues of “beauty, landscape, and nature” are at odds while discussing them as legal considerations for a piece of land to be worthy of conservation on the grounds of “outstanding beauty”.

I remember now, the American painter George Catlin a former lawyer who gave up his career in order to pursue what he saw as his mission, to record in his painting the rapid disappearing of Native Americans from their original home land, he came to associate, live and experience the tribulations they had been subjected both by land speculators, squatters, and American state land robbery during the mid 18^th c. He recorded customs, ceremonies, and the life of this people in his painting and in his diaries. In one occasion while attending a feast in his honor he could not bring himself to refuse the dish he had been offered “Stewed dog” the host with tears in his eyes told him this had been his true companion of years.

Catlin eventually argued with the federal government for the need to create “reservations”, as places where the Indians could still be able to enjoy their particular ways of life and the preservation of wilderness, a place were the “noble savage” could be admired along with the unspoiled beauty of Nature.

Now days it is easy to forget that it was artist and the development of art ideas in the late 18^th hundreds that gave way to current developments in the preservation and conservation of what we have come loosely to perceive as Nature. Today we can eat and sleep with nature, we can watch it, and over a toast boast to others our commitment to its looking after yet, it is harder to confer it an identity, the way we give it to a human being, or the identity that we are ready to give to the Monarch butterfly, to coral riffs, etc to many more species in danger of extinction for instance. It is difficult to confer it an identity, I believe, because we can not dialog with Nature.

It is relevant at this point to reflect upon what we understand by “persona” which at great risk I like to bring into the equation along with the idea of “language preservation”. The need for preservation of habitats, animals, and plant species with all the difficulties involved, is easy to accept because they do not argue. The preservation of a dying language involves people and of course the different way of life that a language has inscribed. Take for instance the English language, English speaking people could not do without the verb “To Be” and that is the question, or Spanish speaking people who through the language perceive to have 2 assertions of being, a permanent one as in “being named”, and a temporal one as in “being seated or running” for instance. The Nahuatl language of 2 million people in Mexico has no conception of being, there is no such verb it does not exist. Yet as a Mexican Nahua Indian I am (this is my anglicized self speaking)

Language in a sense is a tool, but is also who we are, a language can of course exist as a curiosity, recorded but not alive. Like a portrait of a bygone era and like a portrait it cannot talk back. The idea of “persona” or what we confer with a “persona” is borne out of language, and different languages lead to different perceptions of what a persona is. Just imagine Western culture without the Existentialist or Romantic movements, there probably would not be a need for Nature preservation!

And this is the missing part of the equation, the immense diversity of languages on their way to extinction. At present there are about 6000 different languages spoken world wide, 10% of these languages are spoken by 90% of the population in the world. The numbers are very neat.

Weeds, I was told by my Biologist friend are most resilient, wherever land has been deemed and abandoned as over used or polluted, weeds take over and over the years they get to replenish it with nutrients and organic matter. Weeds, he said, are called the red cross of nature. I am confident though that indigenous peoples around the globe are also weeds, untamed, misunderstood, unwanted and as soon as the world may be doomed, their language and their cultures will come to the rescue.

Feedback

Add Your Comment