Artists are rediscovering the oceans that surround them

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Painters were once fascinated by the sea, but today even coastal dwellers need a fresh reminder that they live perched on waters both life-sustaining and violent

AT SOME point, city-dwellers turned away from the sea. It’s hard to say when, exactly, but over the course of the last century, most urbanites stopped depending on the ocean for travel, for food, for work, for pleasure. Coastal residents have become more and more insulated from the water that surrounds them. “The water was a kind of embarrassing secret, the unloved daughter, neglected, while the parks were doted on, fussed over, overused,” muses the narrator of Teju Cole’s novel “Open City” (2011), about Manhattan, an island, one of America’s mythic ports of entry. This is true too in San Francisco, Boston, perhaps port cities everywhere: it is getting harder to sense the sea.

The sea feels largely absent from contemporary visual art, too. It is certainly absent compared to previous eras, when it was of source of fascination and inspiration for painters. The genre of marine painting exploded in the 17th-century Netherlands during the Dutch golden age, the peak of the empire’s naval power. But it is J.M.W. Turner’s Romantic marine paintings that are best known today. Turner, who painted in the late 1700s and 1800s, was obsessed with the sea. His seascapes teem with light and energy and suspended motion. He often painted shipwrecks, boats at the mercy of storms, nearly Biblical scenes of floods, men and women and children flailing in waves. He captured masterfully the sheer force, the awesomeness and the violence of the sea.

Art has traditionally dealt with the sea’s natural violence only. But a compelling body of newer work deals with questions of man’s violence, to the sea and at sea. These works are welcome returns to maritime art, and treat the sea as a political space rather than only a natural one.

Eve Mosher, an American artist, made “HighWaterLine” to directly confront urban blindness to the sea. The project began in 2007 in New York, but has spread to several other cities since. Ms Mosher drew a line in blue chalk through Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, ten feet (three metres) above sea level. Within the next century, scientists estimate that there could be flooding to that point as often as every four years. Large swaths of residential neighbourhoods were below her line, which she drew over the course of six months. Along the way, she was constantly explaining her mission to confused or intrigued or angry or inspired New Yorkers, who were forced to consider the possibility of the sea at their doorsteps.

Five years later, Hurricane Sandy struck New York. Water flooded up to and sometimes past where Ms Mosher’s line had been. “I didn’t set out to be a prophet(ess),” she wrote on her blog. “I never wanted it to happen.” In later incarnations, “HighWaterLine” has been collaborative: in Bristol in 2014, hundreds of people helped draw a 32-mile line.

A number of artists take a similarly literal approach to humans’ relationship with the sea, by working with found objects—found rubbish in particular. Done badly, trash-as-art feels moralising. But Mark Dion’s work is successful because he pays a deep attention to display. This is especially true of the American artist’s work modeled after Renaissance-era “cabinets of curiosities”. His 2014 piece “Cabinet of Marine Debris” features plastic detritus gathered during an expedition to islands off the coast of Alaska—bottle-caps, old moorings, detergent bottles—but carefully curated and arranged like collectors’ objects, giving them a strange beauty. It’s a challenge to the viewer: what are we looking at and why? Does this junk belong in a museum? Does it belong in the ocean? By asking us to consider the objects’ context, Mr Dion also asks the viewer to consider where the debris came from and why it was there in the first place.

Then there is “Vertigo Sea”, a video installation by John Akomfrah, a British artist who has made a breathtaking contemporary portrait of the oceans. It is showing at “Sublime Seas”, an exhibition which pairs it with Turner’s “The Deluge” (of the Biblical flood) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Mr Akomfrah mixes archival film, BBC Natural History Unit footage, original filmed scenes and other video. Played across three screens, it feels like a constantly shifting collage. The sea is a rich source of life, a vast stage for human conflict throughout history, a mass graveyard and a space that is dying itself. The viewer is confronted with scenes of slaves in chains, packed together below deck; a polar bear shot to death; a whale sliced open for blubber, bleeding; icecaps melting; seaborne atom-bomb tests. We also see luminescent jellyfish floating to the surface, and surreal, still scenes that call to mind the paintings of Dalí and Magritte. We hear audio accounts of migrants’ deaths in the Mediterranean, and of women pushed from planes during the Chilean junta. We also hear snatches of poetry.

It is, in a sense, too much. Some scenes are hard to watch. But it’s also mesmerising, a complicated and powerful history of man, beast, and the sea. Like Turner, Mr Akomfrah, Mr Dion and Ms Mosher demand that we pay attention to the sea. But they insist that we look at it in a new way.

“Sublime Seas” is showing at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art until September 16th 2018