Bad Outdoorsmen

“Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness.” – John Muir

This quote opens season 8, episode 5 of the tv show Alone. Every episode begins with a quote, from Roosevelt to Gandhi, but John Muir is the most popular. Like many, during the pandemic we binged Alone and were suspicious of the vision of Muir that the show gestures at – a guy who’s good at being outdoors, is self-sufficient, is a model for the contemporary bushperson. From our research, we knew Muir actually bothered strangers into putting him up for the night while on his long treks across the United States and that he had his brother wire him money so he could stay in hotels and eat at restaurants. This discrepancy—between the performance of the man and the man himself—became a lens through which we came to understand much of contemporary mainstream attitudes toward environmentalism and land conservation in the United States. 

The funding from The Puffin Foundation would be used to edit a multi-channel video installation that we began filming this fall: an experimental audition tape for Alone. We began shooting while artists-in-residence at the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum in St. Augustine, FL in fall of 2022. We anticipate completing the installation in 2023. 

Our collaborative practice is grounded in an inquiry of so-called public lands. We use materials such as tents, coolers, and postcards as sculptural bases that we manipulate with photographic imagery and video. We are drawn to historical landscape photography, environmental literature, and social media images within our studio research, often collapsing many forms and sources within one body of work. While this video is continuation and sharpening of conversations we have begun in previous works, it  will be our most ambitious project to date. 

While in Florida, we met with local historians, ecologists, scientists, park rangers, and Cheyenne and Seminole leaders. In response to this research, we identified filming locations that enabled us to unpack the legacies of early conservationists and their continued influence on mainstream ideas of who belongs in the outdoors. Wearing handmade ghillie suits covered in leaves printed with screenshots from Alone, we shot footage at sites where figures such as John Muir, John Audubon, and William Bartram had failed plantations, misidentified wildlife, killed dozens of birds, and generally behaved badly. We use these locations to point to how troubling these figures are, considering how their racism, sexism, classism, and misunderstanding of the environment has become institutionalized in environmental movements and policy in the United States.