Intimacy and Reflection in Vegetal Time
Some thoughts on Steven L. Anderson’s Entropy Plan for the Western Fam
I wrote this piece with my wife, Liz Lessner, as Yes We Cannibal for an exhibit of the artist’s work at Lyndon House Arts Center (Athens, GA)
Entropy Plan for the Western Fam: Steven L. Anderson June 13, 2024 – August 31, 2024. Entropy Plan for the Western Fam was an exhibition of recent video, painting, and works on paper by Steven L. Anderson. The show’s title plays on artist Joseph Beuys’ 1974 tour of lectures and performances in the United States, “Energy Plan for the Western Man.” Beuys’ interactions with his audience were meant to serve as a continual energy source to solve the ecological and spiritual problems of the time. Yet half a century later, these crises still confront us—as we are confronted by Anderson’s large-scale artwork on paper that sprawls across the gallery’s floor, a crumpled cross-section of a hewn tree.
Howsoever vegetal life may resemble our human lives, it rarely, if ever, threatens to become a mere reflective surface. Steven Anderson’s Entropy Plan for the Western Fam uses this condition to novel effect, engaging with vegetal life to organize a larger challenge to the aesthetic and philosophical lineage of post-war new-age utopianism.
Mat knew Steven from Los Angeles and invited him to bring an early version of this collection to our project space, Yes We Cannibal, in Baton Rouge in the early spring of 2022. His last engagements with Steven, a decade before, had been focused on questions about sentience, politics, and the bounds of acceptable knowledge. We were excited to see how his practice had evolved during the interim period.
A first striking impression was made by Anderson’s deployment of scale in a relatively small gallery space. Offering a clue to his ambitions, the moon peeked down at the viewer from our modest 8-foot ceiling while the cross section of a dead tree overwhelmed the whole space prompting the viewer to count the rings, noticing how many years had gone by.
In a video piece at the far wall opposite the gallery’s entrance, workers labored in orange jumpsuits carrying messages for trees. Bells moved by the wind translated something about this work for the viewer who was left unable to decode the trees’ message but assured of this: processes beyond conception nonetheless transpire.
Three paintings on an adjacent wall suggested the network of roots that undergird this tree system. Like this messaging network, the artist’s breath here became a vehicle of message too. In the creation of these works Anderson dripped and blew ink into linear forms paradoxically composed of trailing lines and pooling masses of color. The grid-like crossing and square tessellations that result evoke order and competency.
In the artist’s breath-work, we notice a productive grappling - the first attempt at comprehension: how can we, as human observers, make sense of the passage of time that these plant forms witness? How can we understand the missives and communiques of species who do not vocalize and move on time scales indecipherable to us?
At the exhibit’s center, the viewer found Anderson’s speculative Half 483 Years, a large-scale paperwork that drapes and hangs and sways and folds. Like the tree that it represents, its surface has been, scratched, and sanded, marked, and marred, offering a series of emergent meditations on time, growth, death, ossification, and memory.
In our gallery, the paper of the drawing had been propped up by spindly wooden sticks, an installation choice made of necessity but a gesture that added to the voice of the material and its immediacy; the structural precarity urging the viewer to meditate on the life of this enormous tree, represented as a dead slice, only half of itself.
What is left after the rest has been cut and made ready for processing. What is left behind by any life, and how can we know it? Titled after the number of years this vegetal being lived, the piece asks what one can ever really glean from number. It’s so much easier to feel weight, become overwhelmed by visual heft, and lose oneself in the widening gyre of its colored rings.
Elsewhere in the gallery, a pyramid of burnt tree rings ascended up the wall. As structures with depth, the black pieces are made of sewn canvas, and protruded from the gallery wall an inch or more, with intermittent burnt orange highlights offering a necessary counterpoint to the massive paper work.
What is the viewer’s responsibility to these vegetal intelligences which enable our lives as a material and semiotic infrastructure? What is our role in shaping the arc of their biographies?
The title of the show is appropriated from Joseph Beuys, a notorious chaos agent in his programmatic call for full energetic transformation. Anderson’s work stages a nimble confrontation with the provocateur. His project is a call from within the Western domestic sphere of home and family; it is made by an artist in midlife who is more father and partner than besotted romantic.
This detour from Beuys’ promiscuous bombast is nicely echoed in the titular “fam,” a term that could be taken to mean either Anderson as he is embedded within the situation of his own nuclear unit, or the casual community of affections.
There was no coyote in this gallery, nor even in the wings. If that figure was, for Beuys, the trickster/specter of an embodied confrontation with the metaphysical other, its analogue, as it is transformed here, is the stabilizing presence that is offered by the plants and the psychedelic foci of their time/space habitus with all the understated questions about them which Anderson suggests in a mesmeric collection of investigatory works, both supple and expansive.
