Brian Ashbee
Art Review, Sept 1999
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Are landscape painters condemned to repeat clapped out
formulae? In the first of a two-part investigation, Brian Ashbee
examines how we have looked at and depicted British landscape and
proposes a way forward.
It's not an easy time to paint landscape. Perhaps it's just not
an easy time to paint. But the combination of those two words, landscape
and painting, seems to imply a particularly conservative activity,
remote from the 'cutting edge' of contemporary practice. This is
hardly new. Indeed, it might be argued that landscape in this century
has usually constituted a rear-guard action in the face of the pressures
of modernism. Landscape painting today is, according to Charles
Harrison, a marginal practice "in so far as landscape painting
has been involved in the debate about modernism and post-modernism,
it has not been landscape as a form of contemporary practice that
has been the subject of debate but the question of how to interpret
18th and 19th century landscape painting. The landscape painting
of the 20th century, in contrast, has generally been regarded as
too marginal to be worth contesting, except by those concerned to
reassert traditional - which is to say provincial - values."
'Provincial' in that last sentence seems like a put-down; 'provincial
values' may well be worth defending, and that's a topic to which
I'll return. But first, we need to define the forces which have
undermined the claims to seriousness of landscape painting in our
century.
First is the commodification of landscape, a consequence of the
very success in the 19th century of landscape as a popular form.
By the last quarter of the century, chromolithography made possible
the widespread diffusion of colour prints of mediocre landscape
paintings, while photography offered its own increasingly authoritative
and cheaply available account of landscape. By the middle of our
century, traditional 18th and 19th century landscape conventions
had become part of an ever-expanding repertory of kitsch, recycled
by amateur painters, postcards, and advertising.
Secondly, the commodification of landscape calls into question
the sincerity and depth of any emotion experienced in front of it.
In the words of W.J.T. Mitchell: "Landscape is a marketable
commodity to be presented and re-presented in 'packaged tours',
an object to be purchased, consumed and even brought home in the
form of souvenirs such as postcards and photo albums. In its double
role as commodity and potent cultural symbol, landscape is the object
of fetishistic practices involving the limitless repetition of identical
photographs taken on identical spots by tourists with interchangeable
emotions."
Mitchell assumes that emotions inspired by commodified landscape
are degraded and trivial. There is perhaps a hint of snobbery here;
are we really to assume 'interchangeable emotions' in the millions
of people who, at one extreme, may be content with a quick snapshot
of the Grand Canyon but, at the other extreme, may search out wilderness
areas or country parks for recreation and exercise? John Barrell,
one of the Marxist art historians favoured by Mitchell, also addresses
this point, explaining how landscape has become a repository of
value in popular culture but there is a sting in the tail: "[B]y
the end of Constable's time, the countryside takes on the negative
virtue of not being the city. It is no longer a place of tension,
but one defined as empty of tension; a place of refreshment and
recreation, where we may discover a sense of our potential as sensitive
individuals which is lost in the urban life of affairs - a sentence
full of clichés, but so is the sense it describes."
The feelings which animated Wordsworth, Thoreau, Emerson, Jefferies
and countless others are dismissed as 'clichés'. Why are
these Marxist art historians so disdainful of the contemplation
of natural beauty? The answer lies in the third and decisive factor:
the re-reading of the 18th and 19th century landscape tradition
undertaken by these same Marxist historians. Building on earlier
work by Raymond Williams and John Berger, recent studies by John
Barrell and Ann Bermingham have, in the words of Mitchell, "decisively
overturned the idealising and aestheticizing account of British
landscape bequeathed to us by Kenneth Clark in favour of a much
more detailed and historically nuanced political and ideological
critique."
At the risk of oversimplifying, one might say that for Clark the
development of landscape was a search for 'pure form' the emancipation
of landscape painting from its earlier beginnings in the backgrounds
of religious and history painting, towards an enjoyment of nature
for its own sake; a development inseparable from the emancipation
of painting from the process of representation. Landscape, in other
words, leads to abstraction. It has been the project of Marxist
art historians to drag landscape painting back into the socio-political
arena from which the painters of the 19th century had so painstakingly
abstracted it. Landscape, these writers have insisted, is a means
of naturalising cultural codes, inscribing cultural meanings into
the land, and hiding the traces of this inscription in order to
present the ideology as if it is just 'nature'.
What does this mean, in practice? In the 18th century, the English
discovered their landscape as a cultural and aesthetic object, just
at the time when that landscape was undergoing unprecedented social
transformation. Precisely at the moment when the countryside was
becoming unrecognisable, painters offered images of a landscape
that was homely and stable. In doing so, they were not acting for
purely aesthetic reasons, but responding to complex socio-economic
pressures. A typical Constable image of wheatfields, cart tracks,
towpaths, stiles and hedgerows seems to the innocent eye the very
image of untroubled continuity and tradition. It says 'Heritage.'
But even the most superficial examination of the historical background
shows that the very forms of the landscape, far from naturally 'given',
were for their public at the time the vehicles of unstable and contested
meanings - were, in other words, ideological.
The field system, the patchwork quilt which is such a comfortable
image of heritage England, is the result of the enclosure movement,
which suddenly accelerated in the second half of the 18th century.
This movement was inspired by landowners seeking to maximise the
productivity of their land, to dispossess small-holders and re-engage
them as tenant farmers or landless labourers. The movement vastly
increased productivity, making England's the most productive agriculture
in the world.
Enclosing the common land meant parcelling it out into rectangles
divided by hedges; enclosed land at first looked smaller and artificial
compared with the more open common lands that preceded it. At the
same time as the open commons were being enclosed, the landscape
gardening movement was putting the same process into reverse: the
enclosed, formal structure of traditional gardens gave way to the
more 'natural'-looking landscape parks of Capability Brown and Humphry
Repton: "[A]s the real landscape began to look increasingly
artificial, like a garden, the garden began to look increasingly
natural, like the pre-enclosed landscape. Thus a 'natural' landscape
became the prerogative of the estate... so that nature was the sign
of property and property the sign of nature." (Arm Bermingham)
Most contested of all is the role in art of the working men and
women who laboured in this landscape. How, as John Barrell has asked,
could these be an acceptable part of the decorations of the drawing
rooms of polite society, when in their own persons they would not
be admitted even to the kitchens? The 18th century begins with images
of Arcadian shepherds in dalliance and repose, proceeds through
intermediate stages showing a contented but recognisably English
poor, at first cheerful, sober and industrious, then ragged and
inspiring of pity, ending with Romantic images of the poor whisked
away from uncomfortable proximity and safely absorbed into Nature.
By the time of Constable, they work in the distance because "the
resentments of the poor are now known to us all, and ... could not
be concealed in any credible image - except by hiding them in the
middleground where we can see their labour but not their expressions."
(John Barrell)
A century and a half later, we may prefer to read Constable's images
as innocent transcriptions of 'Nature' but in doing so, asks Barrell,
do we not "identify with the interest of Gainsborough's and
Constable's customers, and against the poor they portray?"
In order not to see the social and economic problems of which the
landscape is evidence, we can only look at it as a repository of
painterly effects. This was the strategy of Constable and later
painters down to and including our own century, for whom landscape
has largely been a stimulus to purely format effects and abstraction.
Whatever the merits of this Marxist perspective on landscape, its
effect on the possibilities of contemporary landscape practice has
hardly been enabling. This approach contests the legitimacy of any
approach to landscape which does not include its economic and political
aspects. The artist's gaze is characterised, in typically reductive
terms, either as that of the owner (in which case the representation
expresses class ownership of the landscape), or conversely that
of a tourist (in which case it expresses a desire to appropriate
it). Viewing landscape as a category of ideological control negates
any possibility of the artist's relating to the landscape as a source
of individual, spiritual or religious value - indeed, these very
terms provoke Marxists to reveal themselves at their most scathing
and self-righteous (as witness the exchanges between the late Peter
Fuller and Terry Eagleton.) Rather than attempt to continue that
unproductive debate, I would simply observe, of Mitchell and his
school, that (in the words of Richard Wollheim) "many art historians,
in their scholarly work, make do with a psychology that, if they
tried to live their lives by it, would leave them at the end of
an ordinary day without lovers, friends or any insight into how
this had come about."
In place of this narrowly focused but ultimately reductive approach,
I wish to offer an alternative. Instead of the visions and revisions
of art historians, it is based upon recent work in the natural and
cognitive sciences, and it suggests a theoretical perspective within
which the work of landscape artists can be seen in a new and much
more positive light. It draws heavily on the work of a French geographer,
Augustin Berque, whose work is not available in English but which
deserves to be much better known in what the French charmingly call
the Anglo Saxon world.
On one substantive point, both Berque and Mitchell agree: landscape
is not just a genre of art but a medium. This is at first a puzzling
claim. It maintains that the common-sense notion that the artist
looks at the objects in the environment and transforms them into
a work of art is simply mistaken. The landscape is itself already
structured and layered by cultural symbolism. Mitchell explains
it like this: "[L]andscape is itself a physical and multisensory
medium (earth, stone, vegetation, water, sky, sound and silence,
light and darkness, etc.) in which cultural meanings and values
are encoded, whether they are put there by the physical transformation
of a place in landscape gardening and architecture, or found in
a place formed, as we say, 'by nature'. The simplest way to summarise
this point is to note that it makes Clark's title, Landscape into
Art, quite redundant: landscape is already artifice in the moment
of its beholding, long before it becomes the subject of pictorial
representation." This formulation of Mitchell's, produced as
it is with something of a magician's flourish, remains unconvincing.
just how is a natural landscape, untouched by man, already a representation
even before the artist makes his own representation of it?
Berque traces the roots of this paradox to the cognitive sciences.
He finds the answer apparent even in the word 'landscape' itself,
which in European and Oriental languages refers both to the thing
itself and its representation. This oddity of language cannot be
just an accident; in fact it is telling us that the landscape we
perceive cannot be divorced from the way we represent it: both are
in a crucial sense mental constructs.
Landscape is not an object. To understand it, we need to do more
than study scientifically the forms of the environment, though we
must do that. We must do more than study the psychology of perception,
though that too is important. We must also study the cultural, social
and historical determinants of our perception - those elements that
constitute human subjectivity. Landscape is the medium in which
the objective reality of the environment combines with human subjectivity.
This way of thinking is not at all self-evident. It does not fit
easily with the positivism that dominates the natural sciences,
especially those disciplines which study the objective forms of
the environment, such as classical geography and ecology. These
study the environment as a thing-in-itself, independent of the observer.
What Berque - and indeed Mitchell - insist on is the fact that the
landscape is as much in our minds (the subject) as it is in the
environment (the object). We recognise objects by inference, referring
the optical information they give us to a stock of schema, or templates,
which are located in our personal and cultural memories. Our gaze
is not just on the landscape, to an extent it is the landscape.
This approach has been advanced by Gibson in his Ecological Approach
to Visual Perception, of which a central thesis is that our visual
system evolved to make us fit for a particular environment; as a
result, the subject and object of vision must be treated as part
of the same system.
Gestalt psychology and Gibson's ecological approach both suggest
that learning about the environment proceeds from an ongoing interaction
between subject and object: knowledge proceeds from perception,
but perception then proceeds in terms of knowledge. To take a simple
example. Our perceptual apparatus naturally favours regular, simple
forms. A circle, for example, is inherently more recognisable than
an irregular polygon. Once the schema, or mental template, of the
circle is learned, we will notice that the environment contains
many forms which approximate to the circle, and which can then be
represented by it. As Terry Wright has noted, the environmental
features identified by Gibson, which he calls affordances, and upon
which our perception depends, are those commonly found in Australian
Aboriginal painting: "Things that are or can be classified
as roundish or enclosed, for example, waterholes, fruit or campfires,
can be represented by circles; things that can be classified as
elongated, such as rivers, paths, spears and animals lying outstretched,
will be represented by a straight line."
Whatever the merits of the Marxist perspective on landscape, its
effect on the possibilities of contemporary landscape practice has
hardly been enabling.
To be continued... Oct 1999 |
