Fake Plastic Trees: The Future of Landscape at the ICA

In an urban art market whose aesthetic standards are broadcast from a corner office in Times Square, there would appear to be little room for any concept of nature or the natural sublime. Indeed, the genre of the traditional landscape, once the dominant expression of rugged American culture, seems to have drifted out of our cultural view.

It is this assumption that the Institute of Contemporary Art attempts to contradict with its most recent show, From a Distance: Approaching Landscape, a selection of works by 13 contemporary artists. The curators assert that the traditional, romantic notion of landscape, while extinct, has been subsumed into our technological culture. The contemporary revision of landscape, they admit, requires an increasing distance from a traditional experience of nature, as well as an exploration of old issues such as the natural sublime. Also, modernity's telescopic ability to travel impossible distances, from macroscopic aerial overviews and topographical maps to microscopic cellular diagrams, must inform the modern landscape image.

"Characteristic of all the work is a certain distance," the catalogue claims, "from the particular places presented." This notion of distance is over-emphasized by the curators. Distance is a prerequisite for all modes of understanding landscape, and not a thematic motif peculiar to this exhibit. The thrust of From a Distance might more aptly be defined as a moral, ecological and sociological diagram of the tenuous and destructive relationship between humanity and nature in contemporary society.

Each artist in this exhibit makes reference to one of two motifs in the landscape tradition: the untouched romantic sublime exemplified by the Hudson River School and the carefully controlled nature exemplified by the formal French garden. In From a Distance, these hand-me-down conceptions are consistently subverted. The show is a visual diagram of a vicious cycle, of humanity's destruction of nature, and nature's unrelenting growth over humanity. Arturo Herrera's biomorphic felt wall sculpture, "Behind the House I," is the demonic overextension of romanticism's untouched sublime, displaying a terrifying kudzu-like growth which crowds the visual plane with drooping, sinewy forms. David Akiba's superb nature photographs depict a similarly infernal tangle of branches, reminiscent of Jackson Pollock. Roxy Paine's naturalistic miniatures, as exacting as neoclassical gardens, reckon with human pollution: a plot of weeds behind glass is littered with wine bottles, candy wrappers and used condoms. And Michael Ashkin's model-like sculpture "No. 104" depicts a haunting aerial view of an industrial plant-human interference in the natural environment-overrun by oozing swampland. The unconscious emphasis of all these pieces is the horizontal line-a stark, straight, unerring gash that bisects the picture plane and emphasizes the binary of culture and nature.

The weakest and least representative piece-Koo Jeong-a's "Oslo," a miniature sand-dune topography made of aspirin filings-is, ironically, the one selected for the cover of the catalogue. In an otherwise pithy exhibit, this oblique and banal concept piece is a huge misstep. (The curators appear equally confused, commenting on it only with the flustered remark that it "raises questions about the fundamental idea of landscape art.")

Ironically, even when these pieces are at their most incisive-even when the slime and ooze of nature is at its most revolting and the destructive constructions of technology are at their most apocalyptic-they are consistently aestheticized to fit within the framework of landscape art, in unconscious deference to the traditional aesthetics of the Asher Durands and Thomas Coles of America's past.

From a Distance: Approaching Landscape is on display at the ICA, 955 Boylston St., Boston, through Oct. 8. To get there, take the Green Line to Hynes/ICA.