Recent runway shows and gallery exhibitions featuring wetlands suggest the avant-garde has finally found a landscape perfectly suited to standing perfectly still while being swallowed by the earth.
To observe the sudden, breathless proliferation of sphagnum moss across the runways of Milan, or to wander through the damp, meticulously curated peat installations currently suffocating the white cube galleries of Chelsea, is to witness the inevitable terminus of a society that has wholly exhausted its capacity for upward momentum; having strip-mined the mountains for athletic wear and gentrified the forests into wellness retreats, the arbiters of our collective aesthetic have nowhere left to retreat but downward, into the anoxic, tannin-stained embrace of the mire.
One watches the gaunt, trembling figures trudging through the artificial muck of the latest autumn presentations and is reminded, inescapably, of the suffocating, sulfurous gloom of the Stygian marsh in Dante Alighieri's Inferno, where the wrathful tear each other apart in the mud; of the deeply localized, ankle-deep despair captured in the Liber Eliensis, a 12th-century monastic chronicle detailing the slow, agonizing drowning of the East Anglian fens; and, perhaps most tragically of all, of the 2001 animated cinematic fable Shrek, wherein an isolated, misanthropic ogre fiercely defends his stagnant swampland against the encroaching sanitization of a fairy-tale modernity, a struggle that, in its crude, neon-green vulgarity, perfectly mirrors our own desperate retreat into the primordial ooze.
It is a peculiar, albeit deeply telling, phenomenon that the contemporary creative class has chosen to venerate an ecosystem defined entirely by its inability to drain. The bog is not a site of rebirth, nor is it a fertile crescent of burgeoning life; it is, botanically and spiritually speaking, a zone of utter stagnation, a highly acidic purgatory where the lack of oxygen ensures that dead things do not decompose so much as they are tanned, leathery and grotesque, into permanent monuments of their own demise. How fitting, then, that an artistic establishment utterly incapable of generating a single new idea would seek refuge in a landscape whose sole ecological function is to preserve the corpses of the past in a state of suspended, horrifying animation. We have traded the soaring, terrifying verticality of the sublime for the flat, wet comfort of a landscape that merely asks us to sink, slowly and without resistance, into the peat.
The true luxury of the wetland is its hostility to human ambition; it is only in the suffocating embrace of waterlogged moss that one can truly appreciate the textural interplay of our four-thousand-dollar cashmere trench coats.
Consider the recent installation at the Gagosian, wherein a massive, unvarnished rectangle of imported Irish peat was left to fester beneath the halogen lights for six weeks, a spectacle that drew thousands of onlookers who appeared entirely desperate to be told that their own intellectual rot was not merely acceptable, but actually chic. The gallery attendees, clutching flutes of biodynamic prosecco, stared into the sodden expanse with the glazed reverence of pilgrims who have finally reached Mecca, blissfully unaware that the object of their devotion is literally nothing more than decomposed plant matter that failed to become coal. They speak of the wetland in hushed, reverent tones, using words like primordial and grounding, when what they actually mean is that they are deeply, profoundly exhausted by the demands of existing in the twenty-first century and would prefer to be slowly calcified in a ditch.
Vasseur's cheerfully horrifying assessment betrays the fundamental shallowness of the contemporary bog obsession. The tourists of the avant-garde wish to dabble in the aesthetics of the abyss, to don the earth-toned garments of the Tollund Man, to photograph themselves against the bleak, beautiful desolation of the raised bogs of Jutland, without enduring the ontological terror of actually being swallowed by the earth. They demand the melancholic cachet of the wetland while wearing vulcanized rubber boots that explicitly prevent the mud from touching their skin. True engagement with the bog requires a willingness to be consumed by it, to surrender one's breath to the hydrogen sulfide and join the ancient, leathery kings sacrificed in the Iron Age, yet our modern acolytes of the marsh merely wish to purchase a scented candle that vaguely evokes the smell of two-thousand-year-old rot before returning to their climate-controlled apartments.
Ultimately, this infatuation with the wetland is less an aesthetic movement than it is a mass psychological capitulation. We are a people standing at the edge of a vast, unnavigable morass of historical and ecological crises, and rather than attempting to build a bridge across the muck, we have collectively decided to convince ourselves that drowning is the pinnacle of high fashion. The bog does not care about our art, our meticulously distressed outerwear, or our pretentious gallery notes; it asks only for time, and gravity, and it will eventually pull every last one of these transient, fragile trends down into the dark, leaving nothing behind but perfectly preserved, highly fashionable corpses for whatever wretched civilization comes next.