Jason Lanka
artist
Current Projects
Absence and presence play a major role within my work. My explorations are based upon a response to an absence or an outside presence within a specific landscape. I have chosen to use the term “outside”, as I am describing something having an affect on the landscape and creating a disturbance that I feel. I am avoiding terminology like “unnatural” to describe the presence because “nature”, as William Cronon has stated in his book Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature ," is not very natural, if by nature we mean that which is untouched by humans; instead, nature is a profoundly human construction. Not only have wilderness areas been significantly affected by humans, but our very notions of nature have shifted through time in response to changing psychological, sociological, and religious beliefs."
No other species on the planet now or since has had the physical power to be able reshape the landscape as we have. In our ever-growing desire to continually advance our global industries, we are manipulating the surface of this planet at an ever-increasing rate. Yet, do we truly consider that the marks we “draw” on the earth will outlast our lifetime, our culture and our current political boundaries? The Mountain West is filled with the intaglio drawings of cultures thousands of years old. Their imprint, miniscule compared to ours, is still very much present in the landscape. Crisscrossing the country several times from the Eastern seaboard to the Mountain West, I have continually found myself more and more aware of the drawn marks left in the land by our roads, irrigation, and wheel traffic. Like the Nazca Lines in Peru or the irrigation canals of the Chaco Culture left over 1000 years ago, will generations after us use the marks we leave in the surface of our world as a method of understanding our culture? When they do this, what then will the marks we have made communicate about us?
I am interested in the marks our culture leaves in landscape, but also what intrigues me is the constructed image of the individual who makes his mark on the land. I have chosen to use the masculine depiction of man, because I am interested in how Manifest Destiny, an imperialist nineteenth century white male invention, is still playing a defining role in our American culture’s representation of the ideal individual who lives within the landscape. This person has been for better part of my life, the Marlboro Man. Michael S. Kimmel and Amy Aronson did a fantastic analysis of symbolism in the advent of the Marlboro Man in their book Men and Masculinities.
The Marlboro Man symbolizes (the image of) the American Frontiersman, the old fashioned Wild West Cowboy. This form of masculinity evokes images of man against nature, of man as the tamer and dominator of nature and peoples. As he lives in a presocietal world without rules, he makes his own rules. He exists in “uncivilized” territory where his object is to stake out a piece of the world. This trailblazing involves destroying and subduing indigenous peoples, nature and animals. The American Frontiersman is therefore wild, free and unrestrained by society, yet at the same time he is transcendent of nature in that he is a civilizer. He is the tamer and controller of nature.
Each piece will be used by me performing as the “laborer” to create a mark in the surface of the land. The Marlboro Man will be paired with "Rake". As he drags the apparatus across the landscape, he will leave his mark. Because of “Rake’s” extreme size and weight, the Marlboro Man will have to exert himself to the point of physical exhaustion to create his mark. The act of making his mark becomes dualistic in that he is creating a monument to himself, while at the same time performing an act of attrition for his narcissism. The work is meant to ask the viewer to consider the different ways in which we alter the landscape either as individuals, communities, or as a culture. I am asking the viewers to "place" themselves within the landscape.
The three forms I will create are “tools” used to “draw” in the landscape. Acting as the “laborer”, I will document my use of each “tool” as I utilize them. The exhibition of the work will include both the “tools” as sculptural forms as well as the photo and sound documentation of the forms being used to “draw” in the landscape.
