Koen Vanstappen (Mortsel, 4 september 1958) is a video artist and an author with a background in painting and a past in advertising and design.
He lives and works in Brussels/Belgium and Washington DC/USA. He is an art professor at the Mad Faculty in Hasselt, Belgium.
What about nature and culture and their supposed contraposition? When they meet, is there really a difference in their behaviour? Are they substantially different?
Contemporary times prove very well that man is a mere product of nature. Like a medusa or a fruit fly or a fern or a bacteria or a virus. Like worms they fuck around in an apple until every bit is eaten. They die together with the apple and manifest themselves as part of nature. Hence, culture as a product of man is a product of nature and a product of nature cannot be anything else but nature.
One can spend moments of great pleasure watching nature. When walking just at dawn in a shopping center or an industrial park or through a parking lot. The early sun shines brightly in the dewdrops that hang on a ware house sign.
The wind enjoys itself with a plastic bag that is captured by barbed wire.
Only from a human point of view, which is constantly in search of organising things, one can talk about categories where culture and nature are opposed to each other.
As soon as the observer is non-human, all borders between artificial and natural and all
twilight areas between culture and nature are irrelevant and suspended. All elements, human or not, are products of the same world and have the same value.
process. Indeed, when a bird builds its nest, it doesn’t bother about an urbanisation plan either.
Nature does not have a moral problem with the radical intervention of humans in their world. Its habitants suffer and die and go extinct. Or they adapt to their new environment and coexist with what lives in its surroundings.
New behaviours appear and new harmonies are created. In an acte de présence, where doves circle around a silo, they are not the only part of the show. The sound of passing cars, fading in and out, completes the harmony.
Funny, we tend to give agriculture, in contrast to industrial products, an authentic place in nature. While, for ages, agriculture changed the environment dramatically and has been playing a devastating role in destroying traditional habitats.
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