From soil in art towards Soil Art

From soil in art towards Soil Art C. Feller, E. R. Landa, A. Toland, and G. Wessolek Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), 28 rue Dr Blanchard, 30700 Uzès, France Department of Environmental Science and Technology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA Department of Soil Protection, Institute for Ecology, Technische Universität Berlin, Ernst Reuter Platz 1, 10587 Berlin, Germany


Introduction
Soils are too important to be studied by soil scientists alone. We live in a world where 10 disciplinary boundaries often define our work world. Within the realm of science, boundary crossings and territorial mergers are typically of the nearest-neighbor type: i.e., biology + chemistry = biochemistry. Extensions outside of the earth sciences, to the arts and humanities, are less frequent. The last decades show, however, that the activities of the soil science community and its traditional partners were insufficient to protect 15 our soils and landscapes. To encourage more holistic approaches to soil protection our community must open the doors to develop new perspectives by investigating transdisciplinary projects. Soil and art, as well as soil and history, soil and culture, soil and economics, and soil and religion represent just a few opportunities for expanding the scope of soil research and soil protection. 20 Until now, no other planet is known where life is possible. Thus our soil and atmosphere are unique. And consider the medium that is soil -a presence in the daily life of all of us as we tread upon and gain sustenance from the earth. This presence and reality has not escaped the view and attention of visual artists. In this contribution we aim to show how soil art helps to reveal the interconnectivity of soil, life and culture. geotechnical engineer and the soil of the soil scientist or pedologist (in some countries pedology is another word for soil science, in others it is a distinct branch of soil science). For the non-scientific, public at large, including artists, soil is mainly the surface on which we walk.
In soil science, numerous definitions for soil have been published but all agree with Wessolek, 2010, 2014).
With the emergence of environmental awareness and activism during the second part of 20th century, individual artists became inspired by the need to manage nature in a sustainable way. Environmental art, ecological art, and land art are some of the more well-known genres that took up issues of land use, ecology and agricultural change in the latter half of the 20th century.
With the increasing recognition of the soil as an important compartment of the terrestrial ecosystems (since the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992), and of the numerous ecosystem services that it can provide, different artists all around the world have expanded their practices to include soil (and not simply the landscape in general) 15 as a subject of artistic inquiry. In this sense, we can speak of an emergence of "Soil Art." This was first proposed by Wessolek (2002): "It is my personal concern to encourage the foundation of a new art style, perhaps named 'Soil Art'." and later defined by Toland and Wessolek (2010).
Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | than attempt a comprehensive overview, we will offer selected examples that reflect our observations and inquiries as soil scientists with focused interests in art: -Sect. 2 (paintings) by C. Feller, with additions by A. Toland and G. Wessolek, by A. Toland and G. Wessolek, by E. R. Landa.

Before 20th century -representation of soil in art
This part mainly covers paintings in Western culture. Relations between soil and art are numerous and date to Antiquity.
On one side -soil as the medium itself -soils have been used as a material for art as 10 pigments (since the prehistoric wall paintings in caves) (Ugolini, 2010), pottery (clays), etc., and more recently in contemporary paintings to give special effects to the subject (Van Breemen, 2010). On the other side, soil was frequently represented in paintings, mosaics or sculptures from the Antiquity until the present, in the form of lines or surfaces, as an element of the landscape but not as the main subject of the representa- 15 tion. In many cases, it was a schematic representation, as if the artist often appeared to have consciously failed to observe the soil  as in Venus standing in a landscape (see: http://www.louvre.fr/oeuvre-notices/venus-debout-dans-un-paysage). However, in some exceptional cases, the depiction of the soil (as a surface or a soil profile in the paintings) is remarkable. But even in these cases, the focus is on another

Soil profile for the Resurrection of the Dead
In the Last Judgment by Rogier Van der Weyden (1432) (Fig. 3) the resurrection of the dead required the artist to show the soil profile. The complete painting exhibits numerous such soil profiles. Details of emergence of men and women going out of soil profiles (lower part of the painting) are so true to reality that it might be titled "Birth of a 5 Pedologist".

Soil profile for displaying plant roots
In the paintings of the Renaissance, the representation of a ditch or a soil cut in a painting served very often as an excuse to picture roots. In the St John the Baptist by Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516) the figure of St John leans towards a sharp vertical exposure of soil that includes a strange large root: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._John_ the_Baptist_in_the_Wilderness). A large root also appears in The Tempest painted by Giorgione (1477/78-1510) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tempest_(Giorgione)). These works were just some examples of paintings in which large forked roots were made evident. 15 The representation of roots was not due to chance, but chosen for its symbolic value. The root presented in detail in the foreground of the St John the Baptist painted by Bosch could be from the mandragora as suggested by Marjnissen and Ruyffelaere (1987). The mandragora root is thick, hiry and forked, in a humanoid form. The roots of mandragora genus (mandrake) were extensively used by alchemists and in 20 magic rituals. (See: http://mandragore.bnf.fr/jsp/rechercheExperte.jsp, Manuscrits occidentaux, cote: français 12322, fol. 180v, flore: plantain, ca. 1520-1530, Notice no 80/206).
It was also a religious symbol for Christians for whom it was linked to Genesis and aspects of Christ's life. This was the primary reason of its representation in art until the Introduction

Soil profile displayed by the ploughing
From the 14th and during the 15th century, especially in the Très Riches Heures 1 we see representations of agricultural tasks and toils. Here, the soil is depicted with a clear concern of realism and technical specificity, including the tilling of the soil. Herein is an early artistic and technical representation of what agronomists and pedologists 5 describe as an agricultural profile. In addition to this example, Peter Brueghel the Elder (1525/30-1569) might be also be cited for The Fall of Icarus (Fig. 4). Icarus is the tiny figure at the bottom on the right-hand corner, with only his legs visible, while in forefront of the canvas, attention is centered on the good Flemish ploughman tilling furrows. That was the triumph of daily working life over Utopia ("falling from the sky").
Beside the ploughman serving as a reference for agriculture, Brueghel the Elder did not fail to symbolize other of the world's riches -animal husbandry in the form of the sheepherder leaning on his staff, and the wealth of the sea shown in the form of a busy fisherman. It should be also noticed that forked roots are included in the agricultural profile -perhaps meant to be mandrake! 15 Toward the end of the 16th century landscapes and presentations of nature in painting were in some sense discovered as an independent motif. Typical representatives are Dürer, Cranach, Burgkmair, Bosch and Poussin. Incidentally, this development coincides with the emergence of the French model of horticulture (André Le Nôtre, Gardens of Versailles) (Wessolek, 2002). Later, in the the 19th century agricultural art developed 20 a lot at and ploughed soil inspired many artists such as Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899) with the Labourage Nivernais (1849) (Fig. 5 Nowadays, in modern soil textbooks, soil profile are shown and described with photographs. But the early scientific depiction of soil in painting dated from the beginning of the 20th century, either as splendid illustrations in textbooks on soil ( Fig. 1) or prepared for 5 educational exhibitions in amphitheaters, generally as canvases representing different types of soil (Fig. 6). One could consider that as a kind of transition from science to art.
The two oil canvases (60 × 100 cm) represent soil profiles (Fig. 6). These canvases were published as illustrations in the soil science textbook of Demolon (1952, p. 86bis) and were anonymously displayed in the 1940's for a soil science course. 10 In an art exhibition on "The Earth" (2005, Uzès, France), C. Feller presented these paintings, without any technical explanation. The visitors generally found these canvases splendid, and asked if they were painted by a contemporary artist?
Nowadays, some soil scientists such as Gerd Wessolek and Alexandra Toland (Technische Universität Berlin), Ken van Rees (University of Saskatchewan), and Jay Strat- 15 ton Noller (Oregon State University) use artistic techniques in their teaching (Fig. 7), have included soil science students in art activities, and have invited artists to participate in soil science research and teaching endeavors. Soil scientists have referenced paintings by Jacob and Salomon van Ruysdael, Paul Gauguin, Hieronymus Bosch, Peter Brueghel the Elder, and Ambrogio Lorenzetti in communication on historical farming 20 practices, land use, and soil geomorphologic processes Hartemink, 2009;Jenny, 1968), and drawn upon various painting techniques in soil awarenessraising activities, such as the Painting with the Colors of the Earth program with Irena Racek in Austria (Szlezak, 2009), or the soil painting program at the Museu de Ciências da Terra Alexis Dorofeef (Earth Science Museum) in Brazil (Muggler, 2013). Also, 25 paintings by soil scientists are a way of presenting soil scientific concepts in a visual way. Figure 7 exemplarily explores formal aesthetic features (color, texture, structure, composition of horizons) to describe soil properties. Such aesthetic features are often 9 Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | used in field descriptions for soil mapping but are not referred to as such. Capturing the profile in a painting is an exercise in aesthetic observation and documentation that allows the field scientist, student (or artist) to capture subtle details not possible in tabular, written form.
One could mention too the following some other French soil scientists involved in 5 "Soil Art" or "Earthworks" as: applied to canvas to create artificial soil profiles or landscapes, and -Dominique Schwartz (Strasbourg University, France) with his beautiful photos of soils (Fig. 8).

Soil in realism and abstraction: case studies from the 20th century
Here we will give two examples of well-known painters who were instrumental in bring- 15 ing soil themes to a wider audience. These two examples stem from two very different and opposed artistic traditions: European abstract painting and American regionalism, which favored realistic representation over abstraction. Art critics such as John Arthur (1989Arthur ( , 2000 and Lauren Della Monica (2013) have described realism in landscape painting as an ongoing tradition in American Art, sug-20 gesting that our understandings and relationships with the land are embedded in the American cultural experience, as depicted by 19th century painters such as Frederic Church and Winslow Homer and later by, for example, Georgia O'Keefe and Alex Katz. But in the Grant Wood painting, the planting of the tree is not the main subject of the painting rather, it is the soilscape, with its clearly evident schematization of soil horizons. This contrast between the title and the subject is interesting. It reminds one of the Brueghel painting The Fall of Icarus where the main subject was not Icarus, who 15 is quite invisible, but rather a Flemish ploughman tilling the soil. Such a painting really belongs to Soil Art, for the object of inspiration for the artist is clearly the soil and its horizons.

Jean Dubuffet (France)
While painters of genres past used their medium to document specific land formations 20 and land use practices (van Breemen, 2010;Zika, 2001;Feller et al., 2010), many contemporary painters use soil materials more abstractly to explore the physical qualities of a given place rather than to realistically represent it. This turn towards abstract painting must be understood as a backlash against established norms of visual expression dominant in the 19th century. Introduction

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Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | wards abstraction". At the height of action painting and abstract expressionism most notably characterized by artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Dubuffet began using a plastering technique called the "Tyrolean" method in the early 1950s to create large format paintings celebrating the complexity of the soil (Alley, 1981). He discovered he could do splendid paintings using the soil of his garden. About his 5 series Topographies or Texturologies or Materiologies (Fig. 9), he wrote (15 April 1958) to his friend Henri Matisse (  Many other painters before 1970 have used soil as a material or represented soil as a background feature, but it was rare for soil for to be central and presented for itself, as with Grant Wood and Jean Dubuffet. We could mentioned Mark Rothko (1903Rothko ( -1970  Germany. The painting is divided in three horizontal colored parts: red for soil, green for vegetation, blue for sky, but it belongs more as a representation of a landscape than of a soil.

Soil in contemporary painting
In the latter half of the 20th century, more and more painters began considering the soil 5 as a subject of inspiration and artistic creation. Two further examples are the works of as Paul Rebeyrolle and Anselm Kieffer.

Paul Rebeyrolle (France)
Paul Rebeyrolle  was born in Eymoutiers (France). "He has gained recognition as one of the foremost twentieth-century French painters. 10 His striking works of art, centred on violent yet noble themes up hold freedom, combat injustice, intolerance, and the enslavement of both mankind and nature; constituting an authentic testimony of our time" (http://www.espace-rebeyrolle.com/menu.htm). Paul Rebeyrolle's famous Grands Paysages (Large Landscapes) (1978), made with soil, straw, compost, etc., show torrents of water flowing freely between earth massifs, 15 capturing the eroding power and danger of natural forces (Fig. 10).
Many other Rebeyrolle's paintings are related to soil as La Souche (1999)(The tree stump) or paintings about seasons as Le Printemps (1967) (The spring).

Anselm Kieffer (Germany)
Anselm Kieffer (1945-) is one of the most famous artists in the world from the end of 20 20th and beginning of 21st century. Until recent years, this German artist partially lived in Barjac in the south of France (Gard) in a vast domain of "garrigue" (a type of low, soft-leaved scrubland ecoregion and plant community in the Mediterranean forests, woodlands, and scrub biome) that he transformed into an huge work of art: a concrete architectural landscape with buildings and towers in ruins, a cathedral of soil and con- crete and a network of tunnels at the landscape scale as giant earthworm galleries giving access to small houses as art chapels showing very large paintings or other art works. It seems this artist develops a special relationship with soil. Some of these paintings (as many others in different museum or private collections in the worlds) show cultivated fields, which could have caught on fire, a vision of devastation. It looks very dry and bare, but some of these paintings exhibit a glimmer of hope as Aperiatur Terra et Germinet Salvatorem ("Let the earth be opened and send forth a Savior") (2005)(2006). The painting was done with oil, acrylic, emulsion, shellac and clay on canvas with colored flowers catered at the bottom evocating the new birth of life (Fig. 11). These cultivated landscapes are composed with mixed materials including soil 10 but also with reinforced concrete as in the 2004 gigant art work Von den Verlorenen gerührt, die der Glaube nicht trug, erwachen die Trommeln im Fluss at the Sydney's Art Gallery (Australia) (http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/ new-contemporary-galleries/featured-artists-and-works/anselm-kiefer). 15 Installation art provides artists with unlimited media and tools with which to explore the soil as social, ecological and political subject. This is not to say that that more traditional forms such as painting and sculpture are not sufficient to capture the complexity of the soil, but that installation introduces dimensions of time, space, and sensory experience beyond traditional fields of vision. "By inviting the viewer literally to enter into the work 20 of art, and by appealing not only to the sense of sight but also, on occasion, to those of hearing and smell, such works demand the spectator's active engagement" (Grove Art Online, 2009). The prevalence of installation as a visual art form can be seen in the "emergence of soil art," in that it gives artists new tools for exploring our relationships to the soil as medium and its functions for society. Rosenthal (2003) has categorized 25 installation art into two main groups, filled-space installation, and site-specific installation, to which many examples of land art and public outdoor interventions with soil 14 Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | belong. Let us look, for example, at the "filled-space" type of installation art, and differentiate between two directions: (1) installation as immersive spatial experience that relies heavily on architectural design, and (2) installation as Gesamtkunstwerk, 2 or an assemblage of multiple forms that symbolically, materially, or thematically relate to one another concerning the values and functions of soil in society. To begin with the first type of installation, installation as immersive experience, we can think about the soil in terms of its unique spatial qualities. On the one hand soil is solid ground -a dense, stable, immobile field upon which to walk, stand, and build. On rienced by the viewer, as the space occupied by the work cannot be entered" (Kastner and Wallis, 1998).

Case studies of soil in installation art
Thirty years later and only ten blocks away, Swiss artist, Urs Fischer, "installed" a formal antithesis of de Maria's Earth Room by excavating rather than depositing about the same amount of earth from the depths of Gavin Brown's gallery floor and inviting the 5 viewer to actually enter into the work of art at his or her own risk. Here too, the viewer is overwhelmed by the earth materials that challenge the architecture of the exhibition space. The solid ground necessary for any architectural venture gives way to a new and somewhat ungrounding spatial experience. In Earth Room and You, typical conceptions of earth materials, such as ploughed fields or excavated pits for construction work, are 10 brought indoors to disrupt the viewers' normal relationship to the materials and the space they occupy, calling for deeper contemplation of and confrontation with both.

Philip Beesley (Canada)
Another example of immersive installation soil art explores the more porous, labyrinthine qualities of the soil as spatial entity without actually moving a grain. An on- Armstrong, 2011). With far more potential than the massive, inert, singly-functioning building material it is commonly treated as, the soil is seen as a responsive framework for myriad encounters and a physical template for social and biological evolution. Where Maria and Fischer challenge the viewer's experience of architecture by installing soil within the familiar framework of walls and floors in Earth Room and You, Beesley and his partners challenge the very idea of architecture by redefining that framework of walls and floors as a system of reactive pore spaces that imitate the soil. 16 clay particles, the delicately responsive structures of Hylozoic Soil are predetermined to evolve and change based on human (or other biological) presence. A meshed network of movement sensors, air filters, and flasks filled with ferrofluids sends feedback signals of light and rippling movement triggered by the smallest presence of otherness within the system (Beesley and Armstrong, 2011). It is this juxtapositioning of life as 10 container and as contained that creates tension in Beesley's work.
As an installation, or architectural prototype, Hylozoic Soil succeeds in momentarily transporting human experience to the scale of a Collembola, reminiscent of multimedia exhibits that magnify the soil microcosm in natural history museums and soil educational exhibitions 4 . But Beesley and his partners have created more than an installation 15 to contemplate the complexity of the soil. They use the concept of the living soil to challenge accepted notions of architecture by focusing on the fantastic universe of soil pore systems -the spaces in between -rather than the predictable boundaries of cubes and spheres that separate life (via traditional architectural structures) from the wilderness beyond. Beesley remarks, 20 "In opposition to design principles of the past century that favoured optimal equations where maximum volume might be enclosed by the minimum Introduction Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | possible surface, the structures in Hylozoic Ground prefer diffuse, deeply reticulated skins. . . " (Beesley and Armstrong, 2011).
If we think about the immense surface area of an ideal soil, with pore spaces matching aggregates, and sand, silt and clay fractions evenly distributed to allow for optimized flow of water, air, nutrients, and biota, we approach a new vision of architecture where 5 no space is empty and no structure is stationary. A handful of loam becomes the ultimate installation and architectural template for life itself.

Claire Pentecost's (USA)
"As a term that gained currency in the 1960s to describe a construction or 10 assemblage conceived for a specific interior, often for a temporary period, and distinguished from more conventional sculpture as a discrete object by its physical domination of the entire space" (Grove Art Online, 2009), installation art has become a household name in the contemporary art world. By its nature, installation art can reference and appropriate all other visual art forms, 15 cherry-picking different styles, media, and techniques to condense meaning into threedimensional spatial experience. Many artists and critics have referred to (installation art) as an expression of the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, as it appears to borrow from a vast spectrum of disciplines (de Oliveira, 1993). This reading of installation art as a total work of art consisting of many related parts is exemplified 20 by a further example, Claire Pentecost's acclaimed contribution to dOCUMENTA 13 in Kassel, the Soil-Erg (Fig. 14).
In the rotunda of the historic Ottoneum, a theatre turned hospital turned gallery turned natural history museum, Claire Pentecost assembled a series of drawings, sculptures, worm compost, and appropriated museum pieces that all revolved around a can create by learning how to compost. As part of this well-researched "Gesamtkunstwerk," Pentecost participated in a three-month residency program at the University of Kassel's Faculty of Organic Agricultural Sciences, offered workshops at dOCUMENTA 13 on composting, soil health, and capitalist alternatives to land-grabbing, and developed a series of pillar-like vertical planters in and around the city together with designer 5 and philanthropist Ben Friton of the CanYa Love Foundation. The installation at the Ottoneum served as the visual centerpiece of Soil-Erg, visited by thousands of people over the course of the summer. Lining the walls of the Ottoneum are oversized soil coins, too big and crumbly to fit in anyone's pockets, and forty-three drawings in earth-based pigments that reference the graphic style of banknotes. The series of Soil-Erg bills features images of historic figures of sustainable agriculture such as Rachel Carson, Wangari Maathai, and Vandana Shiva, as well as influential ecological artists and writers such as Joseph Beuys and Henry David Thoreau, and a cast of non-human soil workers from snails and bees to fungal mycelium and bacteriophagic nematodes. "The center of the installation itself 15 is the proposal of a new system of value based on living soil" a symbolic and very literal stack of compost pressed in the shape of gold bars, "sculptural objects from handmade soil, or compost (that) represent units of a new currency, the soil-erg (provisional name), proposed as a replacement of the petro-dollar" (Pentecost, 2012). 20 Mounted on another wall of the Ottoneum like the ghost of an affluent fossil fuel past is the Richelsdorfer Mountain Cabinet from 1783, a scale model of Hessen's geologic strata once used for teaching the fundamentals of extraction. Next to the historical cabinet appropriated from the natural history museum's collection, a new cabinet squirms with worm compost produced in part by the food scraps of visiting dOCU-Introduction MENTA guests, offset by a list of current "land grabbing" deals between sovereign countries in Africa, Asia and South America and multinational agribusiness concerns. 5 If we go back to the sheer gravity of Walter de Maria's Earth Room, we recognize not only a playful approach to redefining architectural space, but also an underlying anticapitalist statement intended to free art from the commodification and value control of 5 the market economy -a reoccurring debate of installation art.
Claire Pentecost extends such ideas about the de-commodification of art to the soil, using sculpture, drawing, writing, lecturing, photography, collaborative engineering, participation, composting, gardening, and research as a Gesamtkunstwerk to not only explore but demand new systems of value for the soil. 10 "Made of soil and work, the soil-erg both is and is not an abstraction. Symbolically, it refers to a field of value, but that value is of a special nature: soil must be produced and maintained in a context. It is completely impractical to circulate it. It is heavy, and, because of the loose structure required of good soil, it falls apart. . . The physical nature of soil the soil-erg both evokes and 15 denies the possibility of coinage. If currency as we know it is the ultimate deterritorialization, the soil-erg's value is inherently territorialized" (Pentecost, 2012).

Archives
A third direction in installation art is the archive, as represented by two artists on either 20 side of the planet, herman de vries and Koichi Kurita. 5 Pentecost cites the following websites for her list of land-grabbing info presented in the Soil Erg installation: http://farmlandgrab.org/ and http://oaklandinstitute.org.

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Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | the two main creative streams of our culture in relation to our life space can be integrated" (de vries, 2004).

Koichi Kurita (Japan)
Thirty years later, on the other side of the planet, Koichi Kurita's Soil Library (2006) (see: http://soillog.exblog.jp/) picks up on de vries' minimalist form and meticulous ex-10 ecution with a performance/installation work that celebrates the beauty and diversity of Japan's soils. Koichi Kurita's Soil Library is a comprehensive performance/installation work that celebrates the beauty and diversity of Japan's soils. Kurita has collected over 30 000 samples from around the Japanese archipelago one handful at a time, which he uses to create giant floor installations in a slow and meditative process. Kurita has col-15 lected most of the samples himself and presents them in a uniform manner on square pieces of paper laid out in a grid formation. What makes Kurita's work distinct is not only his performative approach to installation but his ethno-geographic approach to collecting soil. In an email from 27 August 2012, Kurita wrote: "In Japan, when we are born and given a name, we visit the Shinto shrine 20 in the village and pay respect to Ubusunagami, "the god of birth soil." Everybody has Ubusunagami. We believe we are from the soil and we go back to the soil. So I am collecting the soil from all the villages, towns, and cities, for all of the Japanese people. . is given, however, to the cultural significance and local meanings of the documented soils. This omission can partly be compensated by artistic production. Through art, the rich heritage of Ubusunagami that Kurita attempts to preserve in Soil Library is emancipated from forgotten village shrines and private superstitions. The taxonomic descriptions of the soil atlas are brought to life and given new meaning. Secondly, the 15 fundamental dependence of humans on the soil is weighted against the fundamental dependence of soil on human activity -"where there are people," says Kurita, "there is soil." In the age of the Anthropocene, where the effects of damaged soils manifest themselves in worldwide health issues, cancers, reproductive and respiratory illnesses, it is soil that is ultimately contingent on us for its health and safety. Healthy soil is an 20 indicator of healthy societies (Handschumacher and Schwartz, 2010) and birth soil, Ubusunagami, is seen as an indicator of the heritage that develops from worshipping, and ideally also protecting, that which gives life and health.

Cinema and Soil Art
In the visual arts, soil is sometimes "in your face" -it is the foreground, the medium, the center of attention, as in the works of the above-mentioned artists. In contrast and not unexpectedly, this is rarely the case in feature films. Nevertheless, location scouts 23 Introduction and directors clearly recognize that soils can form a visually striking element that adds mood and texture to the viewing experience. Some filmmakers have recognized the human connection to the soil and have used it in their storytelling. A few screenwriters and filmmakers have gone even further, and moved from the typical view of soils a static backdrop on which the action is played out, to a view of soils as a dynamic ecosystem 5 feature. About a decade ago, when I partnered with Christian Feller to edit Soil and Culture, I made a conscious effort to write about an artistic medium that I love -"film" to be formal, but really for me "the movies" -and its varied depictions of soil. The survey paper for that volume, In a supporting role: Soil and the cinema  represented my journey to seek out and explore such films. In recent years, other films, viewed solely as a movie fan, continued to enter my newly focused consciousness, and technical films, viewed early in my career as a soil scientist, came back to mind. Within that retrospective and prospective setting that I now occupy, I am continually exposed to cinematic depictions of soils, soil processes, and soil life, and have come to appreciate 15 these films in a new light. This perspective truly adds to my viewing pleasure, and I have also come to see film as a familiar and effective, common ground (literally!) for talking to non-soil scientists about the nature and properties of soil. "What have you seen lately?" is a constant question for movie fans, and I will share some thoughts from my recent viewing -some films re-visited, some new to me, all with the hope of 20 creating dialog on both film as an art form, and on soil as a component.
Woman in the Dunes (1964) and Dune (1984) focus on not only the dynamism of the moving sands, but also on the subsurface water of the dune as a key ecosystem feature. Soil is central to the story of planet Arrakis in Dune, the David Lynch film based upon the 1965 novel by Frank Herbert. Indeed the "planetary ecologist" who is the hero of the Dune saga was based upon an Oregon soil scientist   (Weber, 2007)) is accompanied by a soundtrack composed and conducted by Ennio Morricone. Images of unfurling seedlings and probing roots have a special magic for scientists 10 and non-scientists alike -see, for example, the 10 January 2014 cover of Science magazine showing a lateral root emerging from the main root of a young Arabidopsis thaliana plant (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/343/6167.cover-expansion). Indeed, moving images of elongating roots seem to beg for music, a fact not unnoticed by Auburn University plant physiologist Elizabeth ("Betty") L. Klepper and her US 15 Department of Agriculture/Agricultural Research Service colleague Morris G. Huck. Their 16 mm film, Time-lapse photography of root growth, depicting research at the Auburn rhizotron (Fig. 15) where cotton roots in soil were observed through glass panels while the plant tops were exposed to field conditions (Taylor, 1969;Huck et al., 7 For soil scientists, an endearing and perhaps unscripted line (33: 10-33:26) in Days of Heaven has a 12-year old girl, played by Linda Manz, musing in voice-over about her future, as she studies a clod of soil and lowers her ear to the earth: "I could be a mud doctor. . . Checking out the earth. . The film opens with a classical musical soundtrack that appears to be a rewrite of Luigi Boccherini's "Celebrated Minuet" 9 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= epJahNtJzss). Klepper wrote the film's narration that was later recorded by a staff mem- //www.ground-breaking.net/exposure.html), an installation that integrates sight and sound across scales ranging from the microscopic to the landscape scale, and that 20 depicts both the physicality of soil and its role as a cultural archive of past civilizations (an experimental 12-minute video from installation is available at http://soundsrite.uws. edu.au/soundsRiteContent/volume4/YoungInfo.html).
Modern rhizotron facilities, sampling devices adapted from engineering and medicine (including borescopes and laparoscopic samplers), and advanced, three-dimensional 25 tomographic imaging techniques offer new opportunities for creative explorations at 9 The Boccherini minuet has been used in the soundtrack of a considerable number of feature films (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0090530/), including the Coen brothers The Ladykillers (2004). 26 described as "creating a sort of animal acting verisimilitude that has gone unmatched on film before or since" (Gilchist, 2012). But from a viewer's perspective of the entire film -aptly described as "an ecological parable set within the science fiction genre" (Bass and Kirkham, 2011, p. 257), soil is primarily manifested not in the microphotography of ant activity, but on the macro-scale, in towering geometric obelisks made of soil. 10 Rising from the desert floor, they are ominous, and the massive and alien occurrence of soil in these ant observation towers, and later in the film, in the form of massive solar reflectors, combined with the storyline and soundtrack, are highly effective conveyors of threat to the viewer. (Having observed much smaller, cylindrical, indurated-soil ant nests in Oregon (Landa, 1977), this image had particular resonance with me -the 15 unfamiliar soil feature in that case provoking curiosity.) Phase IV director, Saul Bass (1920Bass ( -1996, was a noted graphic designer whose corporate logos (e.g., the United Airlines "flying U" and blue/red/orange stripes) are known to all, and whose design of motion picture title sequences and advertising posters made him a sought-after talent in Hollywood -the directors with whom Bass worked included 20 Otto Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Martin Scorsese (who wrote the Foreword to the Bass and Kirkham book). There is a strong linear character in many of the Bass graphics, and this signature style is reflected in the imagining and construction of the soil pillars for the only feature film that he directed.
Bass conceptualized and designed all of the earthen manifestations of the ant civi-available DVD) was screened for the first time in Los Angeles in 2012 (Gilchist, 2012). Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beLpsWaUDNk, it is a stunning summation that is a must-see to get the unambiguous storyline and to appreciate Bass' artistic vision in its full realization. Marketed by Paramount as a B-horror movie, Phase IV had only a small footprint in the US, but was a hit in France (Bass and Kirkham, 2011).
Hopefully Saul Bass' pioneering work will receive greater attention when scholars and movie buffs gather to discuss environmental films, and future audiences will get to see the uncut version of Phase IV.
As soil scientists, our view of soil in films is admittedly atypical. A case in point is the 2011 film from director Lech Majewski, The Mill and the Cross. A truly unique film 15 inspired by a still image -Pieter Bruegel's 1564 painting The Procession to Calvary depicting Christ carrying the cross to the crucifixion in a reimagined 16th century Flemish setting -it has a scene in which a woman is buried alive. The grave has box-like, vertical walls. But even more visually powerful than the geometry are the color contrasts and the strong horizon boundaries in the soil exposed on the pit walls: 20 a very dark surface which grades to a somewhat lighter brown, then a very sharp demarcation to a thick white layer.
Captivated by the image, my first thoughts were: was that the natural color in the soil pit? If yes, was the filming location specifically chosen for this look?

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-Alternatively, were computer generated imagery or other methods used to enhance some profile color effects? 28 I had a series of e-mail exchanges with director Lech Majewski on these questions (e-mails Majewski to Landa: 31 December 2012;26 February 2014). The scene was shot near Katowice, Poland on an old slag-deposit field. The choice of the pit site was just chance -the look of the soil had nothing to do with the selection of the filming location; rather, the slope was chosen to give a good view of the monks in the same 5 shot. The lesson to me was clear -Not all depictions of soil, even if eye-catching for a soil scientist, are conscious acts of filmmaking. But one can dream. . .

Conclusions
As Dokuchaev introduced a more holistic, three-dimensional vision of the soil, artists have been exploring the complex visual, cultural, and symbolic dimensions that are 10 embodied in that three-dimensional soil space. As a consequence of experiences in working on soil and art topics, we conclude that: -Investigations and discussions focused on soils and landscapes can be made much more appealing and relevant to lay audiences by including artistic approaches.

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-Soil science professional societies should encourage new transdisciplinary explorations in areas such as soil and culture, soil and religion, soil and history, etc. Only when our community becomes more broadly based will soil protection become more relevant for the public at large and for decision-makers.
-Artists expand the realm of soil science research with visual, cultural and symbolic 20 forms of inquiry, offering new ways of visualizing, interpreting and interacting with soil.
-An overall aim should be to integrate human aspects, including art, in our work.               . The camera support could be moved to allow photography of any part of the visible root system. The 1/2 inch square grid-wire mesh embedded in the glass panes provided a measuring scale and reduce shattering if the glass broke (from Taylor, 1969).