It's interesting to consider the development of land art in relation to the nuclear anxieties that took up residence in our post-World War II imaginations: the return to the desert, the holes that Michael Heizer dug out like some distant relatives of the cavities left on test sites, the “bombed-out" quarries and landscapes that Robert Smithson favored. Looking at Brian Stechschulte’s paintings, I keep thinking of how much the representation of landscape has changed since those old nuclear anxieties were replaced by viral ones. Now it seems that the paradigmatic landscape is most often either littered with bodies—zombie films, heavy metal album art—or consists of the very inside of one of those bodies. Gunky innards are the new hills like white elephants; Osmosis Jones the new On The Road.
Stechschulte’s paintings, at least at first glance, seem to depict cartoony organscapes, giving us the epidermal, the arterial, and the digestive as our new lowbrow sublime. But what is interesting here is that many of these supposed organs are actually empty speech bubbles. There's this moment of recognition when it becomes clear that what we took for body parts are actually signifiers for language—or the absence thereof. Unlike nuclear anxiety, which seems to have produced reams of text, does the fear/reality of infection shipwreck us at the edge of language, where words fail, turning us into post-verbal ontological hypochondriacs? Can one emit anything other than Beckettian stammering or zombie groaning when one has lesions on the tongue, a gluttonous virus dining on the esophagus?
