Last fall I was caught off guard by Donald Moffett’s Lot 030323 (the golden bough), which was installed in NATURE CULT: TREMOR, a two-artist exhibition with Shaun Krupa at von ammon co in Washington DC. It stood out, literally, among new, biomorphically baroque iterations of Moffett’s more familiar paint-on-panel works. But even as I type this, I realize it was made of the same materials.
Pieces of salvaged lumber and driftwood were painted gold and bolted together in a totemic simulacrum of a tree, with an art book and two of Moffett’s [other?] paintings perched among its branches. The gesture felt akin to a Rachel Harrison sculpture, but in inverse, with the found objects serving as an armature for the made ones. It also reminded me of some past works of Robert Gober, Moffett’s partner, who made plinths of painted bronze cast from styrofoam blocks collected from the North Shore of Long Island.
Lot 030323 (the golden bough), 2023/24, will be on view, with some variations and an expanded date, for one more week in Rockland, Maine, where it anchors Moffett’s show, NATURE CULT, SEEDED, at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. The work in Maine now supports at least one different painting by Moffett—a throat-like orifice replaced by a perch-like birdhouse—and a different book, trading the 18th century botanical illustrations of Mark Catesby for the 19th century bespoke bovine portraits of Thomas Hewes Hinckley. The most substantive difference is the addition of what Brooklyn Rail reviewer Chris Crosman calls “a section” of the golden baugh: a driftwood limb that holds thirteen ex-libris copies of Jeff Goodell’s 2017 book, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World.
Formalistically, I only now realized I missed Moffett’s exploration of found object supports for his paintings, some of which he showed at Anthony Meier in London way back in 2011.
Conceptually, the Maine exhibition is the fourth to use the title, NATURE CULT, but the first to forefront its meaning, a call for a radical ecological rethinking of human-centric culture and the development of a new visual and symbolic language that synthesizes art and science to address the climate crisis. A tree is “the fundamental unit of a forest and the web of ecology that builds out from the tree,” Moffett told CMCA architect Toshiko Mori in a 2023 conversation published in Domus, which is quoted in the exhibition’s announcement.
Moffett and Mori discussed his activism’s urgent turn to ecology a decade ago, and the inspiration of writer Avitam Ghosh. This all meshes with the flooding of New York in Hurricane Sandy, and Ghosh’s 2016-7 callout of the failure of human culture—and culture producers like writers, filmmakers, and artists—to grasp and communicate the scope of the climate crisis.
It feels complicated by the parenthetical title of the work, which references any or all of a story from the Aeneid of gaining access to the underworld by means of a sacred golden bough; an 1834 Turner painting of that scene; or the highly influential yet thoroughly discredited book of comparative religion published in 1900 by anthropologist Sir James George Frazer. Frazer’s white imperialist casting of the march of civilization from magic to religion to science was refuted by historians and anthropologists who actually knew anything about the cultures Frazer cited, and it’s characterization of Jesus as just one more sacrificial god-king scandalized Victorian-era Christians to the point it was omitted from follow-up editions. But it nevertheless took a strong hold in philosophical, literary, and psychoanalytic circles, where Jung, Wittgenstein, and Conrad all vibed with it. Which may help account for the next iteration of Moffett’s project, NATURE CULT PICNIC, getting teased by Tenzin Robert Thurman in The Lacanian Review.
While I cannot myself manage to conceive of a climate crisis solution that does not involve humans, I remain riveted by Moffett’s pursuit of an art that centers the birds and the trees. And I remain inspired by those guys’ efforts, even as the sea level rises, to clean up those beaches.
Nature Cult, Seeded | Donald Moffett runs through 8 Sept. 2024 [cmcanow.org]
Art Seen: Donald Moffett: Nature Cult, Seeded [brooklynrail.org]
Donald Moffett + Shaun Krupa, Nature Cult, Tremor, Sept-Oct. 2023 [vonammon.co]
domus june 2023 | how to address the unthinkable in art, interview with Toshiko Mori [marianneboeskygallery]