“Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third thing that makes it water, and nobody knows what it is.” D. H. Lawrence, Pansies (1929)
Empedocles, writing in the fifth century BCE, was the first to propose a cosmology of four fundamental elements: fire, air, water, and earth. In poetic hexameter, he described the principles of these four rhizomata, these tangling roots, that compose all structures in the world, and associated them with four primal divinities, the deities Zeus, Hera, Nestis, and Aidoneus (Hades). Pre-Socratic philosophers before Empedocles had argued for different archai, seeking single organising principles, whereas Empedocles’s contribution was a system, a set, of elemental building blocks.1
The question Empedocles faced was how to understand transmutation, change, and life itself. In his writing, the four roots are eternally brought into union by love, and eternally pulled apart by hatred. These attractive and repulsive forces (the latter called “strife” in the more common translation) are the divine powers that pervade the world. According to the different proportions in which the four indestructible and unchangeable matters are combined and recombined, the organic structure of the world is produced. Absolute change is impossible in this view, as the “roots” are always the same; things only alter and recombine.
This cosmology of four elements remained an utterly persuasive worldview for more than two thousand years, also reaching beyond a European history of ideas. Only with Antoine Lavoisier’s chemical revolution in the eighteenth century, a system that was foundational for today’s periodic table, did the theory become supplanted. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel admonished in Philosophy of Nature (1817): “The concept of the four elements, which has been commonplace since the time of Empedocles, has been rejected as puerile phantasy. No educated person is now permitted, under any circumstances, to mention [it].” 2
So what is the attraction—even the urgency— around elemental thinking now?
As the philosopher David Macauley puts it: “This ancient thought remains relevant today not because it is empirically accurate but because it is embedded in a vision of the world much vaster than humanity alone. It also is marked frequently by a generosity of spirit, sensitivity to the subtleties of environmental change, openness to nonhuman otherness, and an ontologically egalitarian orientation.” 3 Operating as we are on the eve of mass environmental destruction, elemental thinking offers a decentralized perspective on the world that puts the human and the environment on the same level in a way that scientific thinking has been unable to. In light of our dire ecological urgency, elemental thinking again becomes necessary. Indeed, extreme weather phenomena—floods, earthquakes, fires, and tsunamis—reintroduce the elements with a vengeance and destructive force. Elemental thinking borders on shamanism, proposing as it does a unison of world, spirit, and self that was abandoned by modern science. To cite Dan Beachy-Quick, a translator of Empedocles: “Much of my curiosity about this earliest philosophy is its refusal to demarcate between—what are now for us—different modes of knowing. Here philosophy, poetry, theology, natural science, astrology, history, and myth all keep their wondrous tangle together.” 4
This essay looks at how the work of Lennart Lahuis is concerned with elemental matter—fire, air, water, and earth—and how it proposes something of a return to pre-Socratic thinking, in a world that is thoroughly disenchanted. How might a person today, in this case, an artist, make transmutations palpable? What is at stake first and foremost is how to see the world and account for change. This seeing is attained in processes that render words and images either visible or invisible. It is precisely thresholds of legibility that are at stake in Lahuis’s works, often employing letters as the elemental elements of writing, and of language. The work is an exercise in readability through, and with, the elements.
EARTH
Settling Sediment ~ Portrait (2024) is an elevated acrylic water tank containing an outfit of the artist. A pair of the artist’s shoes and a torch are embedded in a thick layer of loose clay particles. Every few days, a pump blows the particles around the limpid water, rendering the objects invisible, until the clay gradually re-sediments and the objects are revealed again. This new production is a direct response to Joseph Beuys’s and Lothar Wolleh’s Das Unterwasserbuch (The Underwater Book, 1972), a (never fully-realised) project where a book was to be displayed underwater, illuminated by a torch. Lahuis fantasised as to how this work could be newly executed. The inspiration arose when he washed his hands after working with clay, producing clouds of clay particles in the water.
The display of the artist’s garments is a clear nod to Beuys’s iconic outfits: his fishing vest, felt suit, and fur coat. But this is not to suggest that Lahuis aims to adopt a similar public persona; rather, it points to the artist’s absence.
The sediments that flow through the container are made of the same clay as the fragments filling bags and crates surrounding the work. This clay originates from the work Two-stage opening of the Dover Strait and the origin of island Britain, which Lahuis first presented in 2018. On giant clay tablets, the artist imprinted an enlarged version of a 2017 scientific article from Nature Communications describing the long erosion process that cut the United Kingdom from mainland Europe over the course of thousands of years.5 The tablets consist of the same clay as the sea bottom of the Dover Strait. Whenever the work is presented, a constant flow of water runs over the tilted tablets, creating a new erosion that progressively renders the text and figures of the article illegible. Scientific jargon detailing geological processes, as well as landscape and seabed formation, thus suffersactual erosion. This has a clear political significance, as the United Kingdom was then drifting away from mainland Europe due to Brexit, a referendum held just months before the article’s publication. The geological deep time of the article reverberated in the acute timescale of immanent political disintegration.
AIR
Astromelancholia (2020/24) is an astronomical clock that carries photographic images as dials and was created with the assistance of professional clockmaker Toine Daelmans. The basic idea for this clock was to connect images to astronomical timeframes, making them readable in their ‘original’ state only once every 18.6 years. Its outer ring represents solar time, completing its revolution once per day. The second ring rotates every 23 hours and 57 minutes and reflects sidereal time (the position of zodiac signs). Its third ring corresponds to the lunar calendar and the fourth indicates lunar and solar eclipses. The physical mechanism and the functions of the clock are relegated to the background, so as to foreground the utterly slow disintegration (or reintegration) of the text or image that is displayed on the dial; all the astronomical information that one can find in a regular astronomical clock can be deciphered from this timepiece as well, with the help of a manual. The artist has been creating a growing collection of dials that consist of different images and verses that could be mounted on the mechanism and thus relate to astronomical timeframes. There is a clear disjuncture between the cold brass mechanism of the clock (its back end) and what is displayed on the dial (the front end). Importantly, the piece doesn’t just offer the wonder of a functioning astronomical clock but can actually be used as such. The goal is not to dabble in obscure or esoteric knowledge but to present a functioning machine that executes a poetic idea.
The artist prepared three different images that could be mounted on the clock for the exhibition Earth Fire Water Air. Two images show quotes, the first says “mit langem atem, die gleiche,” which are the last words of a review about the Beuys performance Celtic from 1971, also known as Aquarius. This citation translates as “with patience, the same.” “Langer Atem” is a German saying that means to have patience, or rather, persistence. The German word “Atem” means breath, which comes close to the second image, which says “with sighs too deep for words.” It is a line from the Bible (Romans 8:26), which refers to the Holy Spirit. In both cases, the letters are formed by endless small perforations in black paper. The third image was taken at a May 1st Labour Day gathering in Brussels and shows several balloons against the background of a large clock. The balloons say 1st of May; the image is part of a series of images that are burned and described below under “Fire”. This last image will be mounted on the mechanism of the astronomical clock for the duration of this exhibition and will thus be distorted as the four rings in this dial independently rotate before coming back to their starting position in 18.6 years.
WATER
Hydrology (2023) consists of four “steam machines” whose water vapour writes nebulous words that appear for less than a second, then evaporate, then appear again, and so forth in an endless loop. The words describe the continuous movement of water on, above, and below the Earth’s surface:
FROM OCEANS TO CLOUDS
TO RAIN TO RIVERS
TO OCEANS TO CLOUDS
TO RAIN TO RIVERS
The complex hydrologic cycles on which most life on Earth depends are summarised here in arguably crude form—just eighteen words, fleeting, ephemeral, almost intangible. The constant hissing and whirring of the steam machines add cadence to the stanza.
FIRE
On May 1, 1972, following Labour Day demonstrations in West Berlin, Joseph Beuys picked up a broom and, with two of his art school students, swept clean the Karl-Marx-Platz. This work would otherwise be done by Gastarbeiter, migrant workers. The hymns, flags, and banners of the demonstration that are captured in the registration of Beuys’s Aktion Ausfegen (Sweeping Up) give off an image of “the left” as a coherent political entity.
As a direct response to this piece, Lahuis took to the streets of Brussels during a May 1st demonstration in 2023, 41 years later. The result is Pressing Issues (2024), eight photographs from that day. The most striking difference from Beuys’s Ausfegen on a visual level is the cacophony of elements. The left now seems fractured through a multitude of paraphernalia: the various signs, the lighters and wallets that are on offer, but also the multitude of leaflets point to the disintegration of a movement. Banners are held individually, no longer as a crowd. Lahuis proceeded to coat these images with an emulsion so that they could be burned yet remain somewhat legible. Their semi-disintegration mirrors the factionalising of the left as a political movement.
When Lahuis uses earth, air, water, or fire, the primary intent is not to imbue them with new meaning or use them as metaphors. They are literally, and elementally present to make things legible or illegible, and sometimes actually to write sentences with. What does it mean when elements make a word or an image appear or disappear? What does it mean when the presence of elements casts things in and out of focus?
The difference between using elements in their crude form (materially) and metaphorically is that the approach is not so much ecological but rather cosmic. As with pre-Socratic thinking, it is about understanding the elements—seeing them more than a moral or political statement. Connecting with the cosmos in such a way brings Lahuis closer to the position of an engineer with poetic ambitions than that of a largely romantic position. He is concerned with the universe and wants to touch on deeper cosmic workings, but he does not mystify his own position or the elements with which he works. Fire burns, and water erodes or evaporates. The artist’s clothes used in Settling Sediment notwithstanding, Lahuis offers a way to view the cosmos without adding himself to the equation. He collaborates with engineers and graphic designers, or copies from an academic journal, not to stand in opposition to scientific development but to translate its aims and claims to a more poetic field, that of wonder.
The “elemental” has come back with force, from elemental ecocriticism in literary studies to the elemental turn in media studies, where elements become media with which to think the world.6 This acute attention to the elemental aims to reinvigorate materialism as a way to approach and enact environmental ethics. In that sense, Lahuis’s concern is more pre-Socratic, given its understanding of the elements and how they may be joined or pulled apart. The work always first goes back to one or more of the elements, and only ‘through’ them meaning is constructed. This does not mean that more human-centred stakes are off the table, but that the work invites wonder about cosmic processes before making any ecological statement. As Lahuis puts it: “I’m trying to keep the anthropocentric perspective in the background in order to focus on time scales and processes that are fundamental for the human realm yet transcend it.” 7
Hydrology creates a verse for a brief second; Settling Sediment offers a few days of visibility; and Astromelancholia requires more than eighteen years to re-resolve as an undistorted image. As much as these timescales are important, they always also refer to a deeper time, a planetary time. Each work offers a gateway to larger cosmic workings. It is an attempt to read the universe by writing words and creating images via its elements.
1 To be clear, Empedocles spoke of rhizomata—roots—not elements, as it was not until Plato that stoicheion was proposed, on which the Latin elementum is based.
2 Georg W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature. Ed. by M. J. Petry, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Science, vol. 2. London 1970, par. 281.
3 David Macauley, Elemental Philosophy: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water as Environmental Ideas. Albany, NY, 2011, p. 13.
4 Dan Beachy-Quick, “On ‘On Nature,’” Poetry Foundation. May 2022. Available at: <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/ articles/157826/dan-beachy quick-on-on-nature> [Accessed 15 February 2024]
5 Sanjeev Gupta et al., “Two-stage opening of the Dover Strait and the origin of island Britain,” Nature Communications 8, no. 1, 2017. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms15101 [Accessed 15 February 2024].
6 Notably see Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert, eds, Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. Minneapolis 2015; and in media studies John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago 2015.
7 Telephone conversation with the artist, 8 January 2024.