'The spectre of form: Letters from an absent sovereign'

This short essay will respond to a photographic series produced by artist Maria Whiteman during her Studio Time residency at Banff. These photos consist of two diptychs each of which contrasts an image of the gardens of Versailles with one taken of a desolately mined oil sand's landscape; a single fifth photograph reveals an unfinished road, a major future piece in the oil infrastructure of Alberta, stretching off into an empty horizon. In the proposed article I read these photos as provocative reflections on the historical fate of sovereign reason; the issues they raise pertain to that which remains vital or stillborn in the ability of the human mind to shape and alter its environment and future. The gardens of Versailles have historically functioned as emblems of a highly aestheticized sovereignty (both political and epistemological); they have more recently become a shorthand for the violence of 'Enlightenment' reason, for the brutal capture of nature by mathematics and logic. Whiteman's series complicates this contemporary reading: there is a verdure, stillness and elegance to these re-contextualized gardens, one which at the same time does not discount the possibility that the desertified zone of extraction is simply a direct extension of rationalist control gone awry. I will argue that there is a quiet call within these photos to a return to form, to a political humanism of the willed effect and to the strength and vigour of a now almost antiquated political act. A nostalgia, however, that at the same time utterly concedes the way in which contemporary politics and economics are both forms of the same tragic fantasy of centrality, the bad hubris of anthropocentrism.