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June 28, 2009
This picture is part of the River Murray project. It's truth content refers to the bad agricultural practices of stripping the land of trees, which in turn, causes the salty underground water to rise to the surface.The clay pan is a salt pan.
This picture throws off the cosmetics of the beautiful, which from the perspective of an idealist aesthetics, is an ideological and sentimental representation of nature as in itself free from the scars of damage and disruption inflicted by the force and violence of technological mastery over nature.
The Snowy Mountain Hydro Scheme, which provided water for irrigated agriculture and Adelaide as well as power for Sydney, was an example par excellence of the technological mastery over nature in Australia.
A salt pan is the end point of this mastery by the commanding subject with its rational autonomy and reason, since it signifies the presence of death of the land from a rationalized domination of an enlightening reason. There are no bird songs here. So a photograph about the lower lakes area of the Murray-Darling Basin needs to avoid the quest for reconciliation between man and nature favoured by idealist aesthetics. The notion of beauty in this aesthetics is one of a sensuous shining forth of a unified higher meaning aimed at the reconciliation of contradictions. Sstill photography has been largely replaced by commercial images with their glossy emulsion regarded as bodilysurface, a “skin replacing the appearances of resemblance”.
Hence, such a photography needs to appeal to the sublime and dissonance. The sublime shatters and disunites; it signifies a painful operation of holding subject and object; it expresses as it were, a fracturing of the nature and society which ordinarily is hidden from the work of identitarian reason.Consequentl;y, an aesthetic modernity implies a negation of the triumphalism of instrumental economic reason, and the confidence in a universal reconciliation mastering nature to achieve utopia..
The Snowy Mountains Hydro Scheme would achieve utopia by making deserts bloom with liquid gold.
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Governments still adopt increases in economic growth as the overarching imperative and everything else really plays second fiddle, even the ecological disater of the River Murray is a witness against unsustainable economic growth.