Among the Trees

‘Think what it’d be like if everyone started wearing costumes, the man with the gun said. It’d be like living in a wood. And we don’t live in a wood. This town’s been a town since long before I was born. If it was good enough for my parents, and my grandparents and my great grandparents.  

What about your own costume? the person dressed as a tree said.’

- Ali Smith, Autumn

With the metaphoric and poetic potential held in words like ‘branches’ and ‘roots’, it is no surprise trees have provided the backbone for understanding human selfhood and cultural identity. Examples range from Darwin’s ‘Tree of Life’, to ancestral family trees, to religious and cultural manifestations such as The Buddhist Tree of Wisdom and the notorious apple-bearing trees of Eden in the Christian Old Testament. However, it is interesting to note that barely any of these representations have any ‘real-world botanical model’ and thus have simply provided symbolic frameworks from which to can hang our self-affirming ‘truths’ about nature. Harnessing such allegoric power, Among the Trees at The Hayward Gallery was exactly this, an exhibition of trees dressed as people.

In Hugh Hayden’s, Zelig (2013), two manicured logs sit cross-legged and conspicuous amongst the wilderness of the other works. Through fabricating a patina of ‘sharp-tailed grouse feathers’, arranged to resemble tree bark, Hayden makes visible the self-conscious mechanics of assimilation. Similar to his overarching practice: which focuses on humankind’s exploitation of trees, the great unifier, in order to construct borders, such as fences and doorways; Zelig hones in on the complicated thresholds of skin and bark. The logs sit as imposters, yet reside as the most tree-like objects in the museum, questioning the fragile, semiotic power of a surface.

Occupying a much larger space, Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s awe-inspiring video installation, Horizontal - Vaakasuora (2011), stretches itself across six screens in an attempt to render a portrait of the Spruce, a tree native to Ahtila’s home of Finland. Made in response to global warming, for Horizontal, Ahtila decided to rethink the anthropocentrism of the moving image genre by making the tree her subject. Consisting of short films and video installations she terms ‘human dramas’, Ahtila’s wider body of work is characterised by split screen projections which, ‘with their simultaneously charged vantage points, break the idea of cinematic perspective and construct an experience of several co-existing times and spaces for being.’ Contrastingly, Horizontal, shows only one perspective, ours. Despite recognising the human difficulty in documenting such a huge and magnificent organism, from this singular vantage point, Ahtila nonetheless engages in the knowing subject versus the passive object binary, adopting epistemological power over the tree. Perhaps Horizontal would have been more representative of our co-existence if Ahtila had further explored her style and usual incorporation of multiple vantage points. A projection of the tree’s perspective may have generated a new, truly ecocentric space for being. 

As time goes on, simulations of the natural world seem increasingly more present. As an example of this, when I type ‘Among the Trees’ into google, my search results first yield a video game released in June 2020, an adventure in which you can ‘[e]xplore a colorful, breathing world that is filled to the brim with life’. In this way, whilst weaving between pedestals in The Hayward Gallery, I can’t help but see a kaleidoscopic abstraction and oversight, trees twice removed from themselves. The lyrics from Joni Mitchell’s notorious eco-warrior anthem, Big Yellow Taxi, seem ironic, ‘They took all the trees, Put ‘em in a tree museum’.

At a time when the environment urgently needs to be prioritised, Among the Trees problematically affirms our understanding of humans as the central player, locating trees as secondary images via which we can better ourselves. As argued by Alain De Botton, ‘Art can put us in touch with concentrated doses of our missing dispositions, and thereby restore a measure of equilibrium to our listing inner selves’. However, unlike tidying your living room to regain a sense of balance lacking in other areas of your life, trees and their ecosystems are not simply an aesthetic effect of our existence but rather the delicate circumstances for it. More than ever before, we must face that reality. We live in a wood.