Issue: LAND
Volume Two, October 2010
ISBN-13: 978-0-9801764-4-5
copyright 2010 Jan Estep and contributing artists
all rights reserved
Edited, designed, and produced by Jan Estep.
Funded by the Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment, and the Life Sciences at the
University of Minnesota. Further supported by a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.
Front cover: Nance Klehm, Align Yourself with the Invisible, photo by Becky Pflueger.
Back cover: Daniel Seiple, Fontäne.
Jan Estep/Posit Art Press
2421 33rd Ave S
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55406
www.janestep.com
Printed in Minneapolis as an edition of 500
Issue:
LAND
What Does a Sea Squirt Know? Why Art Needs a Brain
Jan Estep
The curious lifecycle of a sea squirt reveals much about our usual classifications of nature, mind, and matter. Tubular and
transparent, sea squirts typically grow in large colonies, attached to ship’s hulls, pilings, underwater rocks, and the ocean floor.
Because they are stationary, as with corals and sponges they are often mistaken for plants, yet unlike plants they do not create
their own food but filter it from seawater siphoned through their bodies. These siphons forcibly expel water outward when the
animals are startled, hence the common name. As nonstandard members of the chordate phylum–animals that at some point in
their lives have a backbone and spinal column–sea squirts are vertebrates that lack any vertebrae.
But it is not just the sea squirts’ resemblance to grounded plant life and true invertebrates that confuses the way we think of
them. Complicating it further is what happens to the sea squirt’s brain once the animal finds a permanent home. In the larval
stage the sea squirt moves through the environment like a tadpole; a spinal cord connected to a simple eye and tail allows it
to swim. At this point the sea squirt has two sets of neural ganglia; the visceral ganglion controls digestion and the cerebral
ganglion controls locomotion. As the animal matures it locates a resting spot and affixes itself, and once movement ceases to be
useful, the sea squirt slowly cannibalizes its nervous system. Tail, cerebral ganglion, and spinal cord are absorbed by the body,
leaving the visceral ganglion intact. In popular terms, the sea squirt eats its own brain, now superfluous.
Cognitive neuroscientists point to the sea squirt as an illustration of how important motion is to understanding the brain. If you
wonder why animals have brains, we may have evolved them in order to move: to adapt to the world that impinges on us, and
to shape it in response. For the sea squirt, when it no longer needs to make these kinds of decisions, the cerebral system fades
away. Given the central role of motion, goes the argument, it makes no sense to study perception, language or other cognitive
processes in isolation from neural motor functions; the perceiving brain is always also the moving brain.
Two points arise quickly from this. The first is that fundamental to understanding our relationship to the world is the brain’s
capacity to translate perceptions and desires into skilled, directed actions. Without a way to change thought and feeling into
concrete behavior, we would essentially be trapped inside of our own heads. The ease with which we stretch out a leg, bite
into an apple or say hello belies the incredible feat being accomplished. It’s only when the gap between our intent and the goal
becomes insurmountable that we realize the true complexity at work. For example, when someone suffers brain damage and
can no longer control her limbs or name the objects around her. Or, an example of another sort, when an artist can’t figure out
a way to give material form to “immaterial” idea. When the pathway is no longer automatic or obvious the action is impeded: the
body stumbles, words are lost, creativity is blocked. Motion is central to what the brain does uniquely well.
The second point presented by the humble sea squirt is the question it analogously poses for the ways humans (and other
animals with more developed nervous systems) are and are not able to connect to the natural world. Reminiscent of a sciencefiction creature, a single sea squirt spends part of its lifetime separated from its environment by a primitive brain, and the other
part fully merged with that environment. Yet it acquires this immersion at the expense of its cerebral neural activity. From a
human perspective this is a steep price to pay for an indissoluble bond with nature.
A classic conundrum in phenomenology is posed by the question, how can a person preserve the sensory fullness of an original
experience? In order to self-consciously record an experience—to name it, to reflect on it, to hold it in one’s memory—the
subject must interrupt the very experience deemed memorable. The same issue also puzzles the field of photography when
the push-pull sets in of capturing the moment or living it. The choice seems to be: remain engaged and embrace immediacy or
withdraw to observe in the hopes of remembering better. Either way, something is forfeited.
If a brain is necessary for consciousness—that is, an embodied brain always situated within an environment—then the
mindless, brainless sea squirt ceases to have this phenomenological problem. In losing the capability for even rudimentary selfawareness, it forgets itself completely. What it achieves is a near impossible communion with the other that was formerly outside
itself: nature. It becomes one with the world in a manner that we can scarcely imagine. Of course, sea squirts, humans, and all
animals are part of nature, but consciousness sets certain beings apart. Only death seems to dissolve this boundary, letting the
organic body decompose back into the ground but long after consciousness is gone.
Not to be stumped by our subjective situation, humans have developed an ability to entertain many levels to our experience
at once, so that it does not always feel like an untenable dichotomy of “be here now” or “lose the moment.” Commenting
to a friend about what’s happening, noting specific details over others, taking photographs, all become integral parts of the
experience itself, not activities opposed to it. In practice—and outside of a philosophical frame of mind—for many people these
extracurricular things are not labeled as less authentic to a more originary event; they are seamlessly incorporated as different
of what’s around the next corner. This ordinary encounter shows that most of us have no difficulty reading the landscape
distantly even as we experience ourselves embedded in it.
A person may long for more direct encounters with nature, and bemoan the hyper-mediated character of life expressed through
a running commentary on Facebook or a Flickr slideshow. Nonetheless, self-consciously documented experiences are no less
real than taking a walk in silence or viewing the landscape without camera or visual guide. This is not to deny the differences
among such activities or to suggest that the impact on the body/mind is identical. However, strictly speaking, it is a matter of
taste, rather than a hierarchical ontology, which someone prefers.
The preferences of the artists presented in this publication side with multiplicity. Each project reveals a deep commitment to the
on-the-ground experience of a specific place yet strategically frames that place in critical and self-reflective ways. Most ask us
to appreciate something that is usually invisible or ignored. In doing so, the works denaturalize the acts of seeing and giving
meaning to the world while also highlighting the social consequences of choices humans make regarding the land.
aspects of the same event. In effect we naturalize the duality of being there and being elsewhere at the same time.
Consider, for example, the “You are here” markers that dot on-trail hiking maps or the orientation displays found at roadside
overlooks. At the sign’s prompting one sites oneself in the landscape using the visual diagram as an aid. A skilled hiker does this
instinctively; however, this localization requires a sophisticated series of calibrations. Looking back and forth between reference
drawing and world, registering landmarks and geographic contours, the subject maps a two-dimensional representation onto a
multidimensional bit of land. She fluidly imagines the body in two states and two situations simultaneously, mentally simulating
the shift in scale between the map-world and the physical world, and her own size and position in relation. All the while she
continues to sense the wind and itinerant birdcall, the slight tightening of her muscles to steady her stance, and the anticipation
The 15 artist projects demonstrate a broad sweep of political, conceptual, and aesthetic approaches from urban interventions to
documentary photography to building green spaces to alternative mapmaking. Participating artists include Christine Baeumler
(USA), Etienne Boulanger (France), The Center for Land Use Interpretation (USA), Song Chao (China), Matthias Einhoff
(Germany), Jan Estep (USA), Simon Faithfull (England), Terike Haapoja (Finland), Nance Klehm (USA), KUNSTrePUBLIK
(Germany), Laura Corcoran Mahnke (USA), Anna Metcalfe (USA), Daniel Seiple (USA/Germany), Mona Smith (USA), and
Rebar (USA)/Works Progress (USA). Their chosen sites include the Mississippi River, underutilized lots in central Berlin,
the Grand Canyon, the Alaskan wilderness, oil fields underneath Los Angeles, Shandong mining district in eastern China,
Minneapolis city parking spots, and the forest floor.
Issue: LAND shows the way a few artists engage the natural/cultural world around them. In turns enthralled and self-aware,
they accept the burden of consciousness and phenomenological otherness and use it in recuperative ways. As these artists
demonstrate, our existential alienation from nature is not a reason to overlook or to exploit but an invitation to recognize the
intricate relationships we form with the landscapes we inhabit.
Art relies on this separation and ability to reflect. Unlike the sea squirt, art needs a brain. Because the ultimate goal for art and
artists is to respond to and to move the world, and to move the viewer in turn.