Waste Land, 2020 – by David Hanson, sound by Jarrad Powell

ICON (Iowa Contemporary Art) – July 1 through July 31, 2021

Waste Land, 2020, HD video, color, sound, 64' continuous loop, dimensions variable

David T. Hanson

Sound by Jarrad Powell

Video production by Allen Cobb

In 1980 more than 400,000 toxic waste sites overspread the United States. The Environmental Protection Agency declared 400 of these highly hazardous and in need of immediate attention. In just a few years, the number of these “Superfund” sites more than tripled. Though they constitute a shocking degradation of our landscape, Superfund sites are never seen by most Americans. But over the course of a year, beginning in 1985, David T. Hanson traveled to 45 states on a Guggenheim Fellowship to make aerial photographs of 67 of them, thus documenting a cross-section of both U.S. geography and its ravaging by industrial waste in one artistic odyssey.

Hanson’s Waste Land series is a master photographer’s meditation on the country’s most dangerously polluted places. Each work in the series juxtaposes the artist’s photograph with a modified topographic map and the EPA’s own description of the site’s history and hazards.

The sociologist Andrew Ross wrote, “Hanson’s Waste Land series is a stunning documentary of a century of organized state terrorism against the North American land, its species, and its peoples.”

Now Hanson has created a video of the entire series, including his aerial photographs, maps and EPA site descriptions of each hazardous waste site. For this video, the composer Jarrad Powell has created an original sound work. Sounds from three different sources—biophony (sounds of animals), geophony (sounds of weather and other natural elements), and anthropophony (sounds created by humans)—interpenetrate and are mediated by minimal electronic signal processing to yield a soundscape. Like a landscape, it is somewhat static, but also changing, with subtlety or suddenness. Through recordings we preserve the sound environment to use and study, even as we destroy that very environment by various means, leading to degradation and extinction. Intended to be played in continuous loop, the Waste Land video becomes a haunting meditation on a ravaged landscape.

Although Hanson’s Waste Land photographs were made in the mid-1980s, the work seems even more relevant today, given our growing concerns about energy production, environmental devastation, and climate change.

As Wendell Berry described in his moving tribute to Waste Land, “Hanson’s art is here put forthrightly to the use of showing us what most of us, in fact, have not seen before, do not wish to see now, and yet must see if we are to save ourselves and our land from such work and such results. He has given us the topography of our open wounds.”

Reviews:

The art historian Suzi Gablik: “The history of Western industrial society’s assault on the earth and the devastation it has wrought are the subjects of Hanson’s aerial photographs. The images are harsh, distressing and terrible. . . . Hanson’s photographs of this ongoing drama are among the most powerful and disturbing images ever to be seen, perhaps because their eerie, abstract beauty almost seems to negate the sinister, hidden life which glimmers in them: landscape as Eros transformed into landscape as Thanatos.”

Jarrad PowellJanuary 19, 2021