Will Lamson

I was most intrigued by Lamson's A Line Describing the Sun and Hydrologies especially because they're aesthetically amazing and I find them weirdly problematic. I find the way these projects interact with nature sort of uncomfortable. Specifically, they have a destructive quality, a willingness to interfere with nature, to force it into complying with the artist's will. I know I'm stretching but it seems so strange to me to take a phenomenon which occurs once every seven years, as in Hydrologies Atacama, and then try to instigate the event out of its cycle. I suppose the project is far too small in scope to have any impact but I felt an instant anxiety about the potential for disrupting the natural cycle of the environment. The way in which Will discusses his practice as a kind of research (tying nicely into our reading from Estelle Barrett on artists as researchers) offers a lens into the projects that does some work to alleviate my (mildly/totally) absurd concerns. It was also fascinating that in the case of Hydrologies Atacama the project didn’t achieve its aim. The flowers never bloomed. Nature did not bend to his will. And yet, he didn’t see the piece as having failed, which I thought was great and buoys the parallels to science that we keep making, in that, a scientific experiment should aim only to find the reality of the hypothesis and not a specific or desired reality.