JEFFREY DEITCH, DAN FRIEDMAN / Artificial Nature

“In an age marked by rapid developments of biotechnology and the progress made in genetic ‘improvement’, we have had to adapt to the new living conditions imposed by the verisimilitude of television pictures, by the green revolution of high-powered natural food as well as by pollution, industrial waste and the greenhouse effect. Nature is becoming less and less of a direct experience for mankind, while our indirect experience of it tends to focus more and more on its artificial aspect. The products of today’s consumer culture have dictated recent ideas about aesthetics, presenting new models to replace the old order of things. Nowadays, the representation of nature is created by teams of geneticists, computer programmers, building contractors and plastic surgeons. In the catalogue’s essay, Jeffrey Deitch underlies the capacity that contemporary art has in responding to this new and challenging reality by raising the question of whether the truth of nature lies below the deposit of human action and exploitation or whether its essence, which has been replaced by the phenomenology of new data, suggests that it has many faces or perhaps none.” - the publisher