Photo Essay
According to Kathrin Huppop: “Subterranean environments are characterized not only by continuous darkness but also by a reduced variability in the number of specific abiotic conditions such as moisture, temperature, and water chemistry, as well as by isolation and restriction in space” (Kathrin Hüppop, in Encyclopedia of Caves (Second Edition), 2012)
Subterranean worlds are clearly marginal worlds due to their isolation and sense of separateness from the mainstream world; the ‘underside’ of a town, an 'underworld', the ‘underbelly’ of a city. They exist as under-spaces with limited supply and variability such as caves, sewers, and drains.
The Roden Crater, located in the Painted Desert region of Northern Arizona, is a large-scale artwork created within a volcanic cinder cone by light and space artist James Turrell. The artist acquired the dormant cinder cone in 1977. Reflecting human visual and psychological perception, Turrel's Roden Crater establishes a controlled environment for experiencing and contemplating light within a highly designed subterranean, marginal world. Situated within the tradition of American landscape art beginning in the 1960s, requiring a pilgrimage through the remote desert at night as an integral part of the art viewing experience.
In this work, Terrel has drawn upon and adopted principles of 'naked eye observatory'. The precariously precise nature of this project is evident through the artist's painstaking process of calculating the excavation and alignment of the crater's tunnels and apertures to make sure they reveal the sky, filter the direct sun, and project vivid celestial visions into the subterranean space.
"The east portal, the alpha (east) tunnel and the sun/moon chamber act in concert as a monumental camera obscura, or pinhole camera." (https://www.designboom.com/art/roden-crater-james-turrell-skyspaces-north-arizona-desert-02-15-2016/)
With a limited invasion of its surrounding environment, only the subterranean space has been transformed: "internally the red and black cinder has been transformed into special engineered spaces where the cycles of geologic and celestial time can be directly experienced." (http://rodencrater.com/about/)
Turrell’s artwork forms a ‘naked eye observatory’ that extends the normal capacity for seeing of the human eye to witness the constant movement of earthly and celestial events, as well as subverting the human-centric notions of the ‘artist’s hand’ or the ‘artist’s genius’ through creating a work based around direct natural, geological experience. Post-humanism is a critical approach displacing anthropocentric, Western philosophical notions of the ‘human’ with its implied, hierarchical conceptions of gender, class, ethnicity, and rationality.
Myths surrounding the New York sewers, their origin and existence, especially the presence of albino crocodiles, reflect the association between subterranean (marginal) worlds and cultural associations with abnormality, as well as the connection between limited environments and mutation. Some say that New Yorkers bought allegators and tried to flush them when they grew disconcertingly large.
Tales of mutant crocs state that they: "...would live the majority of [their] life in an environment [without] sunlight, and thus it would [eventually] lose its eyesight and the pigment in its hide and that the reptile would grow to be completely albino, pure white in color with red or pink eyes. Another reason why an albino alligator would retreat to an underground sewer is because of its vulnerability to the sun in the wild; as there is no dark pigment in the creature's skin, it has no protection from the sun, which makes it very hard for it to survive in the wild." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewer_alligator)
The Great Stalacpipe Organ is an electrically actuated lithophone located in Luray Caverns, Virginia, USA.
A custom console produces the tapping of variously sized ancient stalactites with solenoid-actuated rubber mallets to make corresponding sounds. A solenoid is a type of electromagnet that generates a controlled magnetic field. When a key is pressed, an electrical pulse is delivered to the striker before vibrating the natural formations.(http://mentalfloss.com/article/75920/stalactite-organ-worlds-largest-musical-instrument).
Able to operate without a player, the stalacpipe organ reflects post-human notions 'recognising the specific abilities and capacities of anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic beings alike...(an) expanded definition of life (that) also allows for the inclusion of and interaction with technological artefacts and thus accounts for technological mediation ('mechanic autopoiesis').' (Rosi Braidotti, 'Posthuman Critical Theory', The Postman Glossary (2018)
The volcanic interior that was purchased and reconfigured by Terrel, and the cave that houses the Great Stalacpipe Organ, embody an autonomous quality that sees a rejection of the ‘human’, as well as subverting dualisms between the human and the nonhuman, the living and the nonliving, the animal and the technical. Both of these engineered marginal spaces use contemporary science to challenge traditional understandings of human embodiment.
The great stalactite organ harnesses the affordances of small, isolated, controlled environments to produce subterranean sound, culminating in an other-worldly subterranean experience. It is the largest musical instrument in the world, built by the inventor, mathematician and scientist Leland Sprinkle.
This image of Mexican giant crystal caves exhibits the miraculous growth enables by the controlled environments of marginal-subterranean worlds. Giant Crystal Cave is connected to the Naica Mine at 300m deep, in Naica, Chihuahua, Mexico. The cave is largely unexplored due to extreme heat conditions. The isolated, 'marginal' situation of the crystals allowed their slow crystallisation process over the course of at least 500,000 years.
Underground railways reflect the hybrid term 'nature-culture' that embodies the concepts contained within the 'brook in the city' poem. Underground railways exist as a result of human tunnelling underground to form man-made marginal, subterranean environments that exist below cities. Whilst the poem is about a brook that is thrown beneath a city in the process of development and construction, the earth around the negative space of a dug-out tunnel of earth is lined with brick to make it feel like an urban space.
"I walked across the marble star map that traces a sidereal revolution of the equinox and fixes forever, the Reclamation man had told me, for all time and for all people who can read the stars, the date the dam was dedicated.
The star map was, he had said, for when we were all gone and the dam was left.
I had not thought much of it when he said it, but I thought of it then, with the wind whining and the sun dropping behind a mesa with the finality of a sunset in space. Of course that was the image I had seen always, seen it without quite realizing what I saw, a dynamo finally free of man, splendid at last in its absolute isolation, transmitting power and releasing water to a world where no one is." (Joan Didion, 1970, 'At the Dam')
The Hoover dam is a concrete arch-gravity dam, located in the Black Canyon of the Colorado Rover, and can be described as a 'marginal world' due to its position of in-betweeness on the border between the US states of Nevada and Arizona.
"The bronze sculptures at the dam itself evoke muscular citizens of a tomorrow that never came, sheaves of wheat clutched heavenward, thunderbolts defied. Winged Victories guard the flagpole. The flag whips in the canyon wind. An empty Pepsi-Cola can clatters across the terrazzo. The place is perfectly frozen in time."
Joan Didion's descriptions of the Hoover dam enforce its connection to the concept of deep time, or geologic time, through her sublime vision of the dam as a 'dynamo finally free of man, splendid...in its absolute isolation'
"I used to wonder what it was about the dam that made me think of it at times and in places where I once thought of the Mindanao Trench, or of the stars wheeling in their courses, or of the words As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen."
Like the statacpipe organ, Didion's vision of the dam highlights posthuman notions recognising the individual potential of non-human elements, post-humanism being "(an) expanded definition of life (that) also allows for the inclusion of and interaction with technological artefacts".
Icebergs are natural formations aligning with the closely associated ideas of the subterranean and the marginal. An iceberg is a large chunk of freshwater ice, floating freely in open water after becoming detached from its original glacier. About 80-90% of an iceberg resides below sea level, causing them to drift with the currents rather than the wind.
"iceberg" originates from the Dutch word ijsberg, meaning 'ice mountain'. I think that this etymological connection between icebergs and mountains highlights their similarities- both having a 'secret', 'concealed' underside that is hidden from view; an opposing, conversely situated, 'marginal world'.
The deeply meditative appeal of marginal worlds, which frequently provide perspective into the nature of ‘deep time’, is articulated by Carson who describes the allure of ‘the edge of the sea, where the drama of life played its first scene on earth and perhaps even its prelude; where the forces of evolution are at work today, as they have been since the appearance of what we know as life; and where the spectacle of living creatures faced by the cosmic realities of their world is crystal clear’
Marginal worlds are particularly illuminating spaces in regards to the concept of ‘deep time’, seeming to exist as pure spaces that act as microcosms for cosmic events on greater scales, is evident through Didion’s description of her sublime encounter with the Hoover dam which has a stately presence of timelessness. The transcendental appeal of the marginal is also exemplified with Terrel’s Rodin Crater where the internal space of a red and black cinder has been transformed into meticulously designed spaces conducive to the direct experience of geologic and celestial time.
