Spring has Sprung!
Originally Published in Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Natures, Natural and Unnatural (2015)
It’s 1966, a year before the end of the first pan-Arab spring. Collective consciousness will be bludgeoned by war in 1967.
Andy Warhol is screen printing images of cows in his studio. Sized at 116.7 x 74.5 centimetres.
I wish I was more animalistic in my nature.
The bitter winter depresses me.
I comfort eat to warm my soul
Waiting for the Rite of Spring to take its toll.
A sheath of canvas folds out over me.
Acrylic and crayon textures bristle and rub against my body.
I try to sleep, to be at one with nature. I am informed this is something that one should aspire to. This is post-ecological disaster thinking: one should be more sensitive to the outdoors. One should drive solar-powered cars. One should walk up hills in an attempt to encourage the fight against child obesity, etcetera.
A parade of women marches towards me. Their faces are made out of plastic and their arms out of bamboo, with torsos of prickly long stems. Each wears a wig as white in colour as a ghost.
Each melts off and falls into the grass as they hurtle forward. They descend into the earth: nature’s first time machine.
1910. The year started with a Saturday. The 1910th year of the Common Era, Anno Domini, of the 2nd millennium. The first aviation meetings are about to begin. International Air meet in Los Angeles, California. While Aristarkh Lentulov is painting his Bathers, he has no idea that the biggest race — the one that will engulf our world with its carbon emissions — is about to begin.
Enjoy your image of utopia, friends. Jostling as semi-abstract figurines in some drug-free euphoria.
While in February that year Boyce founded the Boy Scouts of America — a truly emblematic endeavour that was to link ‘manhood’ with the philanthropic act of simply ‘gettin’ out there and doing some darn good!’
A prime minister is assassinated somewhere in North Africa. He was its first native. All the while, another pilot licence is awarded in France. Slavery in China, a country that will eventually become the world’s largest economy, is abolished.
Zeppelins fly. Commercial passenger planes roam and rove. A few months later, the Vatican enforces a compulsory oath against Modernism. Nevertheless, the influence of such institutions starts to diminish. Photography is invented. And with it, everything begins to look like photo surrealism. What is indoor and outdoor is blurred as we float through time; scenes that took minutes to capture look like hours and vice versa. We all begin to look the same.
1998. The Year of the Ocean as designated by UNESCO.
In the East, inflation needs to be controlled. A bomber is sentenced to life imprisonment. This world is too ephemeral we realise and so we continue our search for new places to breathe. We will reproduce those Green Trees, meticulously mapping it out onto the contours of the moon. From Yosemite National Park to The Smokies, our land will be re-fabricated and re-imagined. But the ban on human cloning is still a subject in want of discussion.
Another massacre, another war from the Middle of the East to the East of the East. The threat of terror begins its imagined act of omnipresence. Powers of Horror. We write essays on abjection, the sickness and pain of others. Earthquakes abound, manmade earthquakes. Titanic wins Best Picture and breaks box-office records. The year of monumentality. Google is founded. A new space, a noun, a verb is created. The world is brought closer together.
Hate crimes, Matthew Shephard is murdered. Nuclear disarmament begins. Space shuttles continue to effervesce around the planet, staking new communes.
The 1990s signalled the end of a particular kind of nature. No more waterfalls, the end of grunge and riot grrrl, and the rise of banal girl bands: The end of purity.
The dominance of the Eurozone.
A new kind of collage emerges; sampling becomes de rigueur. Institutional Critique is re-claimed as .net art (not web art). Meanwhile Gary Hume continues quietly transforming enamel onto aluminium in his garden paintings.
We are consumed by new behavioural natures. The way in which we understand Mutual Relations is now devised by the ‘friends
in common’ function on social media. Wild connects to Hippy connects to Gangsta connects to the simulated profile of a house animal: Woof. Woof, which of course, belongs to a Playboy pin-up. They are all subjects of an interstellar network bound by a lust for intangible proximity. So ethereal is our sense of the real that Jaan Toomik is spending his days Dancing with Dad at a gravestone, awaiting transcendence.
Everything has become incongruous. Machines are talking about me behind my back.
We are in an era:
Of slippage. Of contingency. Of time running out too fast. Of merely crossing things off of a to-do list. Of never dancing, of never sleeping.
We are in the age of: Everything, Everywhere.
Where you don’t need to worry about being lost any more. You are as trackable as I am traceable.
But I suppose no one can really get a handle on what goes on in the mind when we pause to look at a pair of still life flowers — the bright yellow blossoms of sunflowers, the kind whose subtle fragrance pierces through the frame and lingers forever.

