I call my aesthetic theory neo-naturalism because it seems to paradoxically derive existential value from an objectively value-neutral world without being reduced to romanticism. Basically neo-naturalism conceives of us evolving as a precondition out of the natural world and ascribes to a complementarily rather than an antagonism between man and nature. While Romanticism presupposes that we have fallen from an Eden-like state from which we might never return, neo-naturalism appreciates that our social development has transcended our natural development so quickly that for the urban dweller, some of the unconscious instincts that were meant to be applied in the natural environment no longer can be, and so we feel a fundamental yearning to reconnect with nature: to own pets, to walk in parks, to do gardening, to go to the zoo, to decorate our homes with plants, etc. Surely some must feel that this is true intuitively without having to wait for proof to materialize from the academia of socio-biology and evolutionary psychology. Romanticism is actually a contingent symptom than a necessary cause of this desire to reconnect with nature to the extent that we feel we are separate from it. Romanticism is often guilty of projecting so much value onto nature that it wants to discourage us from ever reconnecting with it, projecting a fundamental evil upon humanity for daring to foul its own nest. It becomes like a sacred cow in India that we must not touch and that we must hurry to fix it up or else it will all disappear. This of course presupposes that our understanding of nature is adequate enough to know what is best for it. In actuality, nature knows what is best for us and not the reverse, so some radical environmentalists and eco-terrorists may unwittingly be doing more harm than good.

A good example of Neo-naturalism in the visual sense is the art of Robert Bateman, who is perhaps one of the greatest realist wildlife artists living today that happens to have an ecologically-informed background. Bateman is not guilty of romanticism because if he is projecting emotions onto his art that the viewer somehow connects with, it is unintentional or unconscious. Yet Bateman's wildlife art differs slightly from other realistic art because it is shown from a human perspective. Whether or not Bateman is guilty of anthropomorphizing his art is a red herring since even Bateman admits that some degree of anthropomorphization is inevitable since we each see from our own perspective and it is a an irreducibly human perspective that we see from. Romanticism as a visual movement, on the other hand, intentionally tries to infect the viewer with the same emotions as the artist so it is easy to distinguish it from realist art. Such romantic wildlife art may have Aboriginal motifs superficially embedded without the artist being an Aboriginal. These Romanticists tend to ascribe a positive rather than negative prejudice to Aboriginals but it must be remembered that any kind of prejudice is still fundamentally prejudice and is not teleologically justified. Genuine Aboriginal art is also neo-natural in that it presents nature from an aboriginal perspective that cannot be reduced to an appeal to emotions. In actuality, there is no common element between all the various flavors of aboriginal art other than the fact that an Aboriginal created it, so there is no need to stereotype it as being this way or that. Classical naturalism, insofar as it tries to enforce the aesthetic standard that realist art should be presented from detached, objective perspective is self-defeating since it is impossible to expect such a standard from human beings due to our perspectival biases, even if they are merely conceptual biases.



(Copyright © Bryan Kehler, 2004-'05)