Jonathon Miller’s photographic series Concrete (2020) suggests a yearning for the beauty of natural forms against the increasing mechanisation of life, the idealisation of everything “organic”, everything that has grown or taken form “naturally” in opposition to the “artificial” and the “mechanical”. The viewer is presented with images of a stark urban industrial landscape, encapsulating a “disenchanted” view of nature as so much dead stuff, as mere raw material for the processes of industrial production.
Jonathon Miller’s exploration of a nostalgia for a progressively disappearing nature, replaced with concrete landscapes, attempts to visually represent the philosopher Georg Lukacs’ analysis of the Romantic idealisation of nature as an expression of “the feeling that social institutions (reification) strip human beings of there “humanity” and that the more culture and civilisation (i.e. capitalism and reification) take possession of us the less humanity we possess. The idea of “Nature” comes to exist historically in the human imagination as a symbol of the “organic” – somehow embodying real, life-affirming human values in opposition to a disenchanted world dominated by “the ‘ordered’, calculable, formal and abstract character” of capitalist industrialism and “the artificial structures of human civilisation.” Nature becomes the sanctuary of alternative ideals – “that aspect of humanity that has remained natural, or atleast tends, or longs to become natural again: humanity liberated from the false mechanising forms of a dehumanised and reified society.” (Georg Lukacs)
Jonathon Miller’s exploration of a nostalgia for a progressively disappearing nature, replaced with concrete landscapes, attempts to visually represent the philosopher Georg Lukacs’ analysis of the Romantic idealisation of nature as an expression of “the feeling that social institutions (reification) strip human beings of there “humanity” and that the more culture and civilisation (i.e. capitalism and reification) take possession of us the less humanity we possess. The idea of “Nature” comes to exist historically in the human imagination as a symbol of the “organic” – somehow embodying real, life-affirming human values in opposition to a disenchanted world dominated by “the ‘ordered’, calculable, formal and abstract character” of capitalist industrialism and “the artificial structures of human civilisation.” Nature becomes the sanctuary of alternative ideals – “that aspect of humanity that has remained natural, or atleast tends, or longs to become natural again: humanity liberated from the false mechanising forms of a dehumanised and reified society.” (Georg Lukacs)
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