The Big Druid ’ s photographs of trees : Art and knowledge

This article argues that the world-renowned multi-media artist, Willem Boshoff’s, digital image gallery of photographs of trees, flowers and plants on the digital domain of the internet and in his digital archive, forms part of a history of efforts by modern artists to dismantle and stage the reductive divisions between the arts and the natural sciences. By emphasising their agency to richly interweave layers of cultural meaning and ideological questioning, while producing cascades of other images, the objective is to situate the botanical photographs in Boshoff’s digital “image gallery” in an expanded history of imaging, and to explore the layered perspectives that this positioning may entail and divulge. The interpretation includes comparative visual material from atlases and other image galleries, landscape art and land art, photographic and cinematic images, diagrams and scientific “illustrations”, Druid Walks and performances, and so forth. The interpretation ventures to fathom the aesthetic, artistic and cultural significance of this body of photographs, as well as their power to ignite debates on the relationship between art, science, knowledge, wisdom, politics and culture.

Introduction ISSN 2617-3255 in terms of Image Studies, 4 to ask: What is the image-historical relevance of the shifting historical relationships of the division between "artistic" and "scientific" pictures in the interpretation of these photographs?
In recent times, in the context of Image Studies, imaging is cherished as 'epistemic agent' (Marr 2016), as 'cultural technique' (Bredekamp 2010;, as a tool for speculative model building (Daston & Galison 2010), rather than merely as illustrative device. Images are experienced as passages or portals or cues (Elsaesser 2013) for sensing and probing during processes of changing, while picturing. They are valued for their capacity to present, rather than to represent (Elkins 1995). This has not only transformed our perceptions of the ways in which science is pictured, but has also enabled a more refined differentiation and articulation of the various powers of artistic images (Boehm 2007;2008;2012), for instance their capacity to point to (Zeigen), to witness and persuade or provide evidence (Bildevidenz), to affect or to criticise as instruments of knowledge (Bildkritik), and so forth. 5 Already in 1979, Paul Ricoeur queried artificial divisions in perceptions of knowledge acquisition, between the natural and the cultural sciences when he explored the notion of 'fiction' in his essay 'The function of fiction in shaping reality'. He introduces the idea of a 'productive imagination' and explains: images may be seen to have the agency to shape reality. He argues that 'imagination is "productive" not only of unreal objects, but also of an expanded vision of reality' (Ricoeur 1979:128) and that 'iconic augmentation' (used by him in a figurative sense, rather than referring to pictures), performs the labour of augmenting while abbreviating, condensing while developing reality and thus offers transformed or transfigured models of perceiving the world (Ricoeur 1979:136). Ricoeur (1979:126) invents the concept of 'iconic augmentation', because 'fictions' to him do not refer in a 'reproductive' way to reality as already given, but they may refer in a 'productive' way to 'reality as intimated by fiction'. This function of 'fiction' to invent, discover, change, increase and extend reality, has since been associated with imaging in the natural sciences. In their historical differentiation of ways of scientific seeing, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison (2010:383) tentatively characterise current understandings of scientific imaging as 'image-in-process' where images 'function at least as much as a tweezer, hammer, or anvil of nature: a tool to make and change things'.
My aim is to explore the agency of Boshoff's beautiful but seemingly anodyne documentary photographs of punctiliously examined trees, beyond the usual contexts of scientific "images at work" in atlases, in an expanded context of sophisticated imaging, including art. By emphasising their agency to richly interweave layers of cultural meaning and ideological questioning, while producing cascades of other images, I endeavour to situate the botanical photographs in Boshoff's digital "image gallery" in an expanded history of imaging and to explore the layered perspectives that its positioning within such an extended history of images may entail and divulge.
This includes comparative visual material from atlases and other image galleries, landscape art and land art, photographic and cinematic images, diagrams and scientific "illustrations", Druid Walks and performances, and so forth. I probe the heuristic value of contextualising them amidst the historically changing relationships between artistic and scientific imaging evident for instance in the work of Leonardo da Vinci and Marcel Duchamp. The aim of this article is to investigate the scope and nature of these botan-  II, III, IV (1982-1997), 370 Day Project (1982-1983 (1982)(1983) and Garden of Words (1982Words ( -1997, were intimately related to it. 6 As the son of a carpenter, Boshoff possesses profound transmitted knowledge of wood types. He is also a self-styled Druid. Boshoff assumed the persona of the  (Boshoff 2009:1). This cultural ambiguity is suggested in a recent photograph taken of Boshoff draped in a blanket (2019), in the Nirox Sculpture Park ( Figure 5). According to Boshoff, both the words 'inyanga' (in Zulu a traditional healer) and 'druid' mean 'man of trees' (Boshoff 2009:1 which 'all messages' are carved, from which cleft sticks for messengers were cut, from which 'all notch sticks' come with which score is kept. The tree is the mother of literature. The role that this tree plays in the revelation of knowledge is all-encompassing) (Boshoff 1984).
Boshoff's intimation of this profound potential, gift or promise, inherent to trees, to impart wisdom, and his knowhow to aesthetically enhance or harness this in pictures, images, photographs and art works involving trees, I will argue, is visible in Celtis Australis 1 (Figure 1). 8 In the following analysis, I point to several key aspects that characterise Boshoff's interest in and observation of trees, which I scrutinise and develop with reference to other art works and pictures.

One photograph analysed
Celtis Australis 1 ( Figure 1) is a photograph discernibly taken by an artist who is not in the service of a botanist, as earlier "illustrators" of botanical atlases used to be. At work here, rather, is an artist expertly knowledgeable about trees. Since the nineteenth century, a distinction was increasingly drawn between artistic craftsmanship and scientific-technical knowledge, and scientists became associated rather with photographers, than artists and illustrators as before. Since the seventeenth century, atlases were the dictionaries of the sciences of the eye which trained the eye to pick out certain kinds of objects as exemplary, guiding to what is worth looking at, how it looks, and how it should be looked at. They provided the definitive, set standards, how to describe, depict and see (Daston & Gallison 2010:22). As substitutes for natural specimens in the systematic compilations of standardised 'working objects' in atlases, pictures enabled natural scientists to generalise, compare, and to train and calibrate the eye, with reference for instance to the graphic depictions of leaf shapes as in Carolus Linnaeus' Hortus Cliffortianus (Amsterdam, 1737) (as seen in Figure 4) (Daston & Gallison 2010;Ford 2014). Therefore, in the era of scientific objectivity the new photographic apparatus with its aura of technical impartiality increasingly replaced handcrafted pictures. The seemingly merely mechanical procedure of photography had split de-piction from signification.
Early in the twentieth century, however, in order to counteract photography's undermining influence on the principle of mimesis in art, the Cubists, and subsequently page 09 of 27 Number 34, 2020 ISSN 2617-3255 Duchamp, created the first tableaux-objets through imaginative processes of active invention, synthesising seeing and knowing, in order to invent pictures which were able to interrogate in the process of attaining knowledge. Duchamp and other Dadaist artists (to whom Boshoff has a special attraction) ventured to replace "retinal art" with what may be described as visual thinking, or conceptual picturing, often with reference to research in the natural sciences. In the history of imaging nature, one of the most important traditions is landscape art and Duchamp was one of the early artists of the twentieth century to self-consciously re-assess the genre as it had developed.

Landscape art
Duchamp's Pharmacie ( Number 34, 2020 ISSN 2617-3255 revelatory light of heaven; an alternative light of wisdom beyond ordinary vision. 9 This experience of rootedness and being surrounded by an overarching cosmos is a rediscovery of dimensions of the landscape which is overlooked when landscape is regarded as being looked upon or when landscape art depicts a horizontal gaze through the landscape (Boehm 1986;. Similarly, in Piet Mondrian's series of depictions of trees (another artist admired by Boshoff) the horizon is gradually and confusingly lost.
The photograph in Figure 1 shows a personal relationship with a tree in other ways too. It is one picture in a gradual process of familiarisation and acquaintance; of getting to know it as if from scratch, from various stances and distances (Figures 2 & 3), thus producing a variety of photographs of the same species of a tree. In this specific instance (Figure 1), light directs the point of view or stance of the photographer, because the camera lens must be shielded from direct sunlight. According to Boshoff (in personal conversations), the time of day at which he arrives at a specific tree to be pictured, cannot be predicted. Therefore, the light shining upon the tree is a gift of a specific time and place which cannot be changed and to which the artist- In his chapter 'The poetics of tool use. From technology, language and intelligence to craft, song and imagination', Tim Ingold (2000:481) compares the novice practitioner of a musical instrument with a scientist, 'who confronts nature in rather the same questioning way that the novice player confronts his instrument, as a domain of occurrent phenomena whose workings one is out to understand'. The use of tools to acquire knowledge in this phenomenological sense is also described by Ingold (2000: 72) in terms of early nomadic hunting practices: the weapons of the hunter, far from being instruments of control or manipulation, serve this purpose of acquiring knowledge. Through them the hunter does not transform the world, rather the world opens itself up to him … In short, the hunter does not seek, and fail to achieve, control over animals: he seeks revelation.
The manifestation of a personal relationship between artist, observer, participant and the tree, by the use of a camera, a photograph of a tree, and a collection of photographs of trees, challenges habitual ways in which knowledge is construed to be acquired through a division of mind, hand, and senses. Knowledge-making By being enfolded and actively taking part in the tree's disclosure or "revelation" of itself (see Figure 1), there is no separation between understanding and doing. Rather, in these photographs, sensing, perceiving and understanding are visibly conjoined in a fundamental way. The process of taking the tree photographs is an artistic practice of knowledge-making which integrates and interweaves techné at various levels in the picture. In this way, the tree photographs not only impart botanical knowledge, as well as imply diverse stances towards the relationship of humans and nature, as in landscape art, but also interrogate the foundations of knowledge and the boundaries between the arts and the sciences.
Although the photograph implies an "artist's stance" towards nature, it additionally affords a detailed or "scientific" observation of the discernible attributes of the specific species. This includes features such as its typical elephantine bark, clearly visible in the foreground of the photograph (Figure 1)  that if you want to describe nature in words, 'the more you will confuse the mind of the reader and the more you will prevent him from the knowledge of the thing described.
And so it is necessary to draw and to describe'. In the work of Leonardo (Benesch 1943:311) his penetrating research of natural objects is transformed and developed into an aesthetic experience, because of his deep understanding of the functions and shapes of the separate parts (Figures 10 & 11). In a meticulous study, in Windsor Castle (Figure 11), of the branching structure of an Italian Poplar, drawn in red chalk, the artist shows for instance the discovery he had made that the age of a tree can be computed from the number of the main shoots of the branches arranged in concentric layers (Benesch 1943:316). Leonardo's finely rendered copse of birch trees in red chalk from 1508 ( Figure 12) in the top corner of a page of one of his notebooks, on the other hand, succeeds in combining the nearness of the experience of tactility of feathery leaves with what seems a distant horizon. He seems to suggest the gentle movement of the trees in the flow of air and the trembling of their leaves blurring their outlines. It has been argued that in the era of computer-generated images, the work of the imagination is acknowledged once more and that the contribution of the imagination to make scientific images comprehensible, has increased. Bernd Huppauf and Christoph Wulf (2013:16) assert that '[h]ighly technical images correspond to the aesthetic imagination to an extent that no previous science image ever did'. I have endeavoured to make gradually clearer how Boshoff's photographs unobtrusively yet insistently, interrogate the historically shifting horizon of the relationship between aesthetic and scientific imaging by appealing to the 'productive imagination' (Ricoeur 1979) and thus transforming models of perceiving the world. As Boshoff was suffering from lead poisoning at the time, it was with empathy that he examined his diseased "tree-friends". All the photographs taken on these peregrinations were arranged in the order in which they were taken, and labelled Tree Walk in the digital archive. This Tree Walk ultimately sparked the idea of his subsequent famous Druid Walks which could be described as land art performances at any location, during which he still searched for revelations of nymphs or presences or genii loci at selected sites, taking photographs, often joined by a silent crowd of participants.

Acheiropoietoi
In the more than 500 close-up photographs taken during the meditative Tree Walk, Boshoff experienced moments of seeing "true images" or vera icons produced naturally by the trees themselves. He experienced that, 'The ancient history of this enigmatic place has somehow forced its way up through the roots of the trees to become visible on the surface of their bark as "body" and "skin"' (Perryer 2007:4). In these close-up photographs, some of which he selected for the exhibition, he framed or cut (true to the etymology of the word 'detail') a part from some trees to make a picture resembling human body parts. However, the title of the exhibited series of photographs, He wiped his face with the cloth she gave him on his way to Golgotha. It describes the 'untouched figurative elements' in the photographed trees which seems to have been imprinted on the tree by nature itself (Perryer 2007:4). This makes them comparable to the category of objects discussed by Lorraine Daston (1998:232)