Poetic license

Sebald's 'After Nature' inspires a post-apocalyptic exhibition

Berlinde de Bruyckere's sculpture in painted wax and resin resembles a burnt cadaver. (Benoit pailley)

NEW YORK - Submitting to the death-haunted vision of the late German writer W.G. Sebald is hard to do in the late-summer playground atmosphere of New York's Lower East Side. But "After Nature," the New Museum show inspired by Sebald's eponymous poem, is a group exhibition that deserves to be seen - even if the experience calls for a stiff drink straight after.

The display could have been tighter, the selection process more ruthless. But in seriousness and ambition, "After Nature" sets a standard to which most museum shows and themed biennials don't even bother to aspire.

Drawing together an array of celebrated contemporaries, outsider artists, and historical figures, the show indulges a mood of keening, rapturous, post-apocalyptic despair and, for the most part, does it intelligently.

Sebald, who died in a car crash in 2001, has a cult following among artists, despite the difficulty, the obscurity, and the strangely antiquarian atmosphere conjured by his writing. More, perhaps, than his other books, "After Nature," a long poem published posthumously, feels like an apt point of departure for an art exhibition: Divided into three sections like a triptych, the poem focuses in its first part on the northern Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald and is scattered with the kind of wild and mournful descriptive imagery that evidently gets under the skin of many visual artists.

Sebald was obsessed with loss. His writing, impossible to categorize, ranges widely (the second two sections in the poem "After Nature" deal with episodes in the life of the 18th-century naturalist George Stellar and of Sebald himself), but it returns in various ways, rarely direct, to the Holocaust.

About Grünewald surprisingly little is known, which suits Sebald's purposes perfectly, given his obsession with forgetting and his taste for inventing "facts." But Grünewald's masterpiece, the Isenheim Altarpiece in Colmar, France, with its shudderingly graphic depiction of Christ's agony on the cross, has long been admired by artists interested in depicting extremes of suffering.

Indeed, several artists here deal with the human body in extremis in ways that bring Grünewald to mind - most notably Berlinde de Bruyckere, a young-ish Belgian whose work suggests ancient apprehensions. Her sculpture here in painted wax and resin resembles a burnt cadaver. Its realistic lower half is intact (those long limbs and pointed feet might be Christ's on the cross), but the upper half - in a way that seems entirely organic - has been transformed into gnarly roots and branches.

If the piece suggests the magical metamorphoses of ancient myth, its waxy pallor and natural history museum presentation in a glass box suggest something less poetic, a fate beyond enchantment.

To its credit, the exhibition is an attempt to summon up a mood or sensibility rather than illustrate any kind of hypothesis. It claims sources of inspiration other than Sebald (including Cormac McCarthy's crushing 2006 post-nuclear novel, "The Road"). Many works here do, however, chime directly with passages from Sebald's poem.

Zoe Leonard's bare tree propped up by steel poles and cables, for instance, matches the description of trees "bare, as often they appear in Grünewald's/ pictures, loom[ing] up into the sky."

And the marvelous black-and-white photographs of Roger Ballen evoke Sebald's passing reference in "After Nature" to "the manners in which a human being/ creeps into himself, herself or seeks/ to get out."

Until recently, Ballen, an American long resident in South Africa, supplemented his photography by working as a mining entrepreneur. I rate him as one of the finest photographers working anywhere in the world today. His images are highly contrived graphic arrangements of recurring ingredients - damaged-looking humans, small animals, improvised sculptural objects, and art brut-style scrawls - in bare interiors.

They are riveting. They confront us with things we are afraid of and things we adore and then sow confusion between the two. One minute, the pictures seem like blurted expletives delivered in the most harrowing and personalized terms; the next, they appear funny, tender, sweetly prankish.

When it appears in Sebald's book, the phrase "after nature" is meant in a sense familiar to artists - as in "painting after nature." Indeed, Sebald suggests that the encroaching darkness in Grünewald's "Crucifixion," now in Basel, may have been inspired directly by something he observed, an eclipse.

But Sebald's description of this eclipse ("a secret sickening away of the world,/. . . in the midst of daytime like a fainting fit/ poured through the vault of the sky") suggests another sense of the phrase: a giddy apprehension of the world after some unbearable cataclysm. And it's this apocalyptic sense of the phrase that the show's curator, Massimiliano Gioni, seems to have had in mind when selecting his artists.

Thus, one of the most powerful inclusions is Werner Herzog's "Lessons of Darkness," a film that uses footage of burning oil wells in Iraq - recorded in the aftermath of the first Gulf War - for the purposes of creating a far-fetched science fiction movie. Or not so far-fetched: After all, the footage is real; this happened.

Such sly upendings of the relationship between fact and fiction are characteristic of Sebald, too, and chime with other works in the show. We are invited to read, for instance, several pages of apocalyptic ravings by the late American Reverend Howard Finster ("WE ARE NOW IN AN UNDERGROUND WAR. WE ARE SUFFERING FROM BURNED FORSTES [sic] BOMED STRUCTURES LOSS OF SHIPLOADS OF OIL," etc.) and to view the fascinating "celestographs" made by the playwright and painter August Strindberg in 1894.

These fraudulent photographs were made by exposing chemically treated plates to the night sky. But their uncannily celestial look was not the result of the movements of the stars, as Strindberg insisted, but, more banally, the effect of ambient moisture and air.

There are weak works in the show: I was bewildered, for instance, then bored, by the Puerto Rico-based duo Allora and Calzadilla's piece combining grafted tropical plants with a digital text-based artwork by Jenny Holzer. And I felt that Maurizio Cattelan's show-offy sculpture of a taxidermied horse dangling from a wall, its head seeming to disappear into it, spoiled the show's mood of wincing hyper-sensitivity.

But other works have stayed with me. Among the best were the photographs of buildings fallen into ruin and enveloped in vines by William Christenberry, Diego Perrone's bleak yet antic photographs of deep holes dug into wasted ground interspersed here and there by a naked figure striking ludicrous poses, Artur Zmijewski's mesmerizing video of a middle-aged man with an amputated leg being carried and washed by his naked companion, and, finally, a display of Pawel Althamer's lugubriously naturalistic sculptures of standing naked figures and empty, hanging clothes made from straw, grass, hemp, animal intestine, wax, hair, leather, and papier-mâché.

In their pathos, Althamer's sculptures made me think of Sebald's passage in "After Nature" about "the extreme response of our bodies/ to the absence of balance in nature/ which blindly makes one experiment after another/ and like a senseless botcher/ undoes the thing it has only just achieved."

Or, as he writes elsewhere in the poem, "What is this being called human?"

Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com