Brian Ashbee
Art Review, Oct 1999
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Whither the noble genre of Turner and Constable? Brian Ashbee
continues his investigation of landscape. Once a form
has been learned and a mental schema or template acquired, there
will be a tendency to find that form in the environment and with
it, a tendency to adjust irregular forms in the environment to fit
existing mental templates. The circle as a mental idea is a Platonic
abstraction, to which roundish forms, like fruit, campfires and
waterholes (rarely in fact quite circular) can be made to fit. The
circle as a perfect form, incidentally, runs through our own cultural
history as much as the Aborigines, from prehistoric stone circles,
the rose windows of gothic cathedrals, the maps of the medieval
world (even when the world was supposed flat) to the mud and stone
circles of Richard Long.
I believe that extrapolating from this can tell us much about the
way art develops. Styles in art are also forms of regularity, or
simplification, just as a circle is a form of regularity in the
geometric sense. Once a style of art is learnt, we tend to find
corresponding forms in 'nature'. That is to say, the environment
furnishes us with complex data onto which virtually any style of
painting can be imposed; or, more precisely, art furnishes us with
perceptual templates by which the complexity of the environment
can be simplified, allowing us to perceive, and represent, 'landscape'.
When Mitchell and Berque insist that landscape is a medium, they
are pointing out that such processes are inevitable, built into
our very act of seeing.
Paint or photograph the sea on a calm day. A flat horizon dividing
the picture plane suggests formal abstraction. Photograph the sea
in a storm, with a slow shutter speed, and you have an image suggestive
of Abstract Expressionism. The 20th century painter, well-versed
in a vast range of styles, looks at the natural environment and
finds there confirmation of whatever vision he brings. The post-modernist
painter may look rather at the degraded or second-hand images of
nature circulating in our culture. But neither has direct, unproblematic
access to the objective reality of the world. Even when we look
at the landscape seeking the Other, we can see only what the templates
of style allow us to see - and that is more a reflection of ourselves
and our culture than it is a vision of Otherness.
When Andreas Gursky photographs a featureless patch of dirt, he
is seeing it as a minimalist painting. When Bill Brandt photographs
the female nude as if her forms were those of rounded rocks in a
landscape, or when Georgia O'Keeffe paints the rocks of new Mexico
as if they were the sexual organs of female nude, both are performing
the act of 'seeing as' - seeing one thing as if it were another.
In much the same way the 18th century traveller, well-educated
in Arcadian landscapes, looked at the landscape of Tuscany or even
Warwickshire, and saw them as the pastoral visions of Claude; and
if he needed a little help, he could raise a 'Claude glass' to his
eye and give any landscape lacking in charm the golden glow of a
much varnished canvas. This act of 'seeing as' has come to be known
as intertextuality. And the transformation of the English landscape
into parks was the result of not one, but two acts of 'seeing as':
firstly, Poussin, Claude and Salvator Rosa seeing the Italian landscape
as if it were that of Greek and Latin pastoral poetry. Then the
English nobility of the 18th century seeing the English landscape
as if it were paintings by those same French and Italian painters.
A remarkable form of intertextuality embracing two thousand years
of European history.
Berque's analysis of Modernism has profound implications for the
future practice of landscape art.
Modernism, for Berque, is a cultural phenomenon that goes far beyond
the narrow confines of art. The classical paradigm of Western Modernism
was constructed in the 17th century. Its crucial architects were
Bacon (experimental method); Galileo (decentring the cosmos); Descartes
(subject/object dualism); and Newton (absolute space, homogenous
and isotropic.) At its heart was the discovery of the physical world
as such and in itself, uncoupled from human subjectivity. This approach
has since been validated by the unprecedented progress in science
and technology; but it also provoked an unprecedented fracture in
human history: from now on, the objects of the physical world are
posited independently and separately from the phenomenal world,
in which those things are perceived by men. A simple example of
the difference: in the physical world, the earth rotates around
the sun. In the phenomenal world, the sun rises in the East. It
is in this latter world that landscape exists. It is in this latter
world that we exist.
The spirit of objective investigation that characterised Modernism
(in Berque's wider sense) expressed itself in art in two closely
related ways: the 'birth' of landscape and the discovery of perspective.
Linear perspective constituted the 'symbolic form of the emergence
of the modern subject', in Panofsky's words; it depicted a world
reduced to a collection of objects all describable, measurable and
manipulable - and emptied of all subjectivity. The subject has now
vanished from the space objectified in the picture; the spectator
is confined to a single, unmoving viewpoint outside the space; the
subject and the object are confined to two incompatible worlds.
In the same way, science now studies an objective world, from which
human consciousness has been excluded.
Cartesian dualism lies at the heart of the Modernist paradigm:
thought divided from the world, mind from matter, subject from object.
The subject, enthroned at the centre of absolute, homogenous space,
expresses itself by means of symbols inscribed onto the physical
world, over which his technology has given him a new mastery. He
reorganises the physical world in the light of perspectival representations
such as the linear perspectives of the baroque palace or city, such
as Versailles and St. Petersburg. In 18th century America, the grid
pattern favoured by city planners inscribed the squared format of
their graph paper over a continent.
With the 20th century, glass, steel and the elevator made possible
the extension of the grid upwards, into vertical space. Absolute
space, thanks to the International Style in architecture, has asserted
itself all over the planet, neutralising the individuality of real
places, imposing identical forms everywhere in the name of modernity.
Everywhere the same thing all over the earth, symbolising the self-creating
invariability of the modern subject. The space thus imposed on the
world is hostile to tradition, destructive of all architectural
vernaculars; it is utopian space (where 'topos' means a 'non-place.')
It has been clear since the 1960s that the Modernist paradigm has
outlived its usefulness. We can only represent the world at the
cost of a reduction in its complexity. (It is only in a story by
Borges that a representation - a map - can be of the same size as
the terrain it represents.) All other representations simplify,
falsify. That is their power, their beauty and their danger. The
templates of perception are useful because they simplify, but they
lose their usefulness when, as tends to happen in time, the aspects
of the world they leave out become too glaringly obvious. This is
why styles in art outlive their usefulness. The modernist impulse
has today lost its authority. What role can the landcape artist
have in constructing an alternative?
Berque has envisaged a recoupling of the physical and phenomenological
worlds that the Modernist vision had separated. A re-symbolisation
or re-enchantment of the world. Not based on a return to older forms,
such as superstition or religion, but based rather on what he calls
eco-symbolism. This means a re-engagement with the world in all
its complexity, co-opting all the tools of knowledge we have at
our disposal, including those available to the physical and natural
sciences.
The question is how to preserve, without being overcome by, the
complexity of the world; to compensate for the destruction of natural
eco-systems, at risk as never before from massive economic and political
pressures. The Third World is desperate to Modernise, at whatever
cost to its natural environment. Wilderness areas, of which few
remain, will be under increasing pressure, shrinking constantly,
as the wealth of species within them is steadily reduced. Remorseless
human population growth, and continued flight of people from the
country to the cities will lead to the continued expansion of these
cities, in particular the shanty towns that surround the high-rise
business districts: islands of affluence in a sea of squalor.
As the majority of mankind come to live in predominantly man-made
environments, severing their links with the rural and semi-rural
environments which evolved over millennia, the question poses ever
more urgently of how we are to construct the landscapes in which
we will live. But the fact is, we no longer live in landscapes,
but cityscapes, or even midscapes, soundscapes ... new virtual realities
created by information technology and image manipulation. How do
these effect the communal sense of place which past societies evolved,
and through which they developed a sense of identity, of belonging
to a particular place?
It seems likely that the effect of these new technologies will
be to anaesthetise the sense of place essential for landscape sensibility.
Increasingly, we are a society which has before its eye images from
elsewhere, but these elsewheres increasingly seem to resemble one
another, as the homogenising effects of modernisation effect more
and more parts of the globe, just as the holiday destinations to
which we dream of escaping increasingly resemble one another, and
the 'natural' landscapes we dream of resemble theme parks, whose
theme is 'nature' - like the Centre Parcs now opening in the UK
Of course it's no use trying to freeze landscape in heritage areas.
Living societies evolve by transforming their environments. But
the opposite extreme from mummification, that of decomposition into
incoherence is equally alarming. The post, modern aesthetic of do
anything, anywhere, risks being just as damaging to a sense of place
as the modernist aesthetic which it replaces. The end of the grand
designs of modernism, especially those of the modern movement in
architecture, have left the landscape directionless. No one knows
quite what to do with it. And so much the better. There is a need
to abandon grand designs and attempt to understand how each individual
landscape is made, how it evolves and how it functions. Working
thus, we will be better equipped to create worlds which are worth
living in. And it is here that the role of the landscape artist
may be crucial to the construction of a new sense of belonging to
the planet.
Landscape, as should by now be clear, is more than just a representation
of the surfaces of things: it is the medium through which we construct
our common sense of the world. Artists working in landscape need
not feel marginalised, or 'provincial', to return to the quote from
Harrison with which I began. And what in fact does 'provincial'
mean? It means rooted in a specific place, both historically and
geographically. This is clearly at odds with Modernism, which has
detached artistic practice from its roots in particular societies
to claim autonomy for art, but which has ended in a global phenomenon
of 'everywhere, everything the same.' The same abstract paintings
adorning the boardrooms of identical office blocks in New York,
Paris, London and Hong Kong. Provincial may mean art that has reengaged
with life as it is lived in a particular place; art such as that
of Terry Setch, for example, studying his patch of Welsh beach,
a natural environment of sand and rock, continually reshaped by
the tides and the intrusive pollution of man - a laboratory in which
destructive global forces can be seen at work. These works, as Paul
Moorehouse has pointed out, 'celebrate a new dissonant order forged
from a marriage of the natural and synthetic, and simultaneously
they warn us of the threat that man poses to his environment.'
Equally rooted in particular rural locations are Michael Porter
in Derbyshire, lan McKeever in Devon, and John Virtue in Exeter:
all of them reworking the language of modernism in the light of
their personal sense of place. Perhaps, as Keith Patrick has suggested,
provincial means no more than art before the processes of international
marketing have got hold of it.
These artists all have established reputations, and a proper analysis
of their work and its relationship to place might well redefine
'provincial' in more positive terms. I'd like to end, however, by
considering the work of two less well-known artists, a painter and
photographer, whose work brings these issues into particularly sharp
relief.
Landscape, in the photographs of Charlie Meecham, is raw material
shaped by powerful economic and political forces, and the human
presence - a figure at the corner of a street, a face glimpsed in
a passing car, or an allotment surrounded by industrial wasteland
- seem barely of account. Nevertheless, this landscape of the industrial
North does bear witness to work-dominated lives, in the ruined industrial
buildings, dilapidated housing and eroded tombstones which coexist
uneasily, as if accidentally, with the electrical transmission and
road networks which strike across this ravaged landscape with sovereign
unconcern for the small lives lived in their shadow. Many of the
photographs are scenes of such ordinariness as to seem like casual
snaps. Empty car parks, crowded traffic junctions, a traffic island
in the middle of nowhere, its street furniture an eerily modernist
statement of formal purpose in a landscape drained of meaning. Meecham
avoids aestheticizing his subjects, declines to frame and crop them
in such a way as to bring to the foreground their formal characteristics,
preferring rather what he sees as an openness to interpretation,
an invitation to the spectator to engage with the implications of
what the image often leaves unsaid. And that, to me at least, is
the question of how we have allowed this extraordinary world to
seem so ordinary, so 'given', as though it were quite 'natural.'
The effect on the landscape of road and motorway building programmes
has intrigued Meecham, who has followed the contractors over many
months, documenting the processes of construction and destruction
in what he describes as a non-judgmental way. His most recent, on-going
work also involves a road, whose existence may come as news to many
in these islands: the E20.
This is a road concept, much as a walk by Richard Long is an art
concept: it only exists in the minds of Brussels road planners.
It links Limerick to Dublin, Liverpool to Hull, Esbjerg to Copenhagen,
Malmo to Stockholm and Tallinn to St. Petersburg.
The geographically challenged may not have noticed that this route
involves no less than seven sea crossings, many of them not served
by ferries. Clearly this is a route of the mind, rather than reality.
Meecham, perversely perhaps, has been documenting its English stretch,
more familiar to you and I as the M62. He has made two sets of pictures,
one of the landscape seen from moving lorries, the other set taken
from fixed positions and 'responding to the questions raised by
the travelling glance, the idea being to set up a dialogue by pairing
the pictures and possibly forming a sort of visual echo.' Meecham
is intrigued enough by the project to want to extend it across its
whole European length, following a narrative thread linking different
cultures and landscapes, inspired by histories of salt ways and
silk roads from pre-industrial epochs.
What is palpable in Meecham's work is the sense of landscape as
a medium constantly evolving, expressive of our political and social
relationships, and often expressive in ways that are brutal or functional
or indifferent to human or aesthetic values - except that these,
too, are 'human' in their raw purposefulness. The 'natural' is squeezed
into corners, or glimpsed as a blurred outline through a vehicle
window - a background murmur whose voice is easily drowned by the
louder statements of roads.
The industrial North also figures significantly
in the work of the painter Alan Rankle, who grew up on the edge
of Oldham, surrounded by the relics of the industrial revolution,
whose presence is hidden and transformed with references to the
Arcadian landscape tradition. This willingness to address tradition,
running from Claude and Poussin through Turner to our day, makes
Rankle almost unique among contemporary landscape painters, and
it is perhaps in part a consequence of his period working on the
restoration of 18th and 19th century landscape paintings. Rankle's
aim, however, is not pastiche or parody but rather a reappraisal
of tradition through its disruption. There is a strong sense in
Rankle's work of landscape as a site of conflictual readings, in
which various styles of representation vie for primacy - not as
a mere exercise in style but grounded in the struggle to convey
in paint the direct experience of landscape forms. Rankle has studied
Chinese brush painting techniques, as well as the mental and physical
discipline of T'ai Chi, (of which he is now a teacher,) which have
strengthened his belief in the unique capacity of painting and drawing
as a vehicle for psychological inquiry. Long study of natural forms,
acute concentration and practice of manual skills permit the artist
to convey, in gestures of great economy and directness, a form of
knowledge which no other medium can convey.
Rankle's work enacts a confrontation between the direct experience
of nature and the mediating styles of art, and the violence of this
confrontation can he quite shocking on first viewing. This initial
emotional charge is gradually refined, on prolonged attention, as
the expressive gesture (so evocative of the painter's presence and
his attempt to seize the reality of his subject) gradually dissolves
into the scene represented, recalling as it does so, the landscape
conventions of Claude or Ruysdael. Rankle is a skilled performer
of the act of 'seeing as', and the paintings offer us the pleasures
of complex perceptual games: see this blob of opaque golden paint
as a gesture, replete with the urgency of the painter's hand, but
see it also as the late sun's rays catching the trunk of a tree,
magically reminiscent of Claude. Dribbling glazes, abrupt marks
made by large brushes suggest the vocabulary of expressionism, but
- combining unexpectedly with delicately painted foliage reminiscent
of Ruysdael, suddenly transmute into representational marks conveying
atmosphere, light and shadow. The intertextuality of which I wrote
above, that links Latin pastoral poetry to Claude and Poussin, down
to Turner in the 19th century, is here extended to embrace Chinese
brush painting and abstract expressionism.
These paintings confront the reality of landscape today as an unstable
theatre of conflicting signs, a site in which observation, gesture,
description and abstraction seem to co-exist and in his best work,
to fuse into a momentary vision uniting two thousand years of landscape
tradition. If Meecham's photographs raise questions about landscape's
future, Rankle's paintings assure us of the vitality of its past,
and its continuing vital role in our culture. As he has written:
"for all of society's opposition to the natural environment,
we and all our works are nature ... the medium is our collective
psyche, our link with Nature."
Essential to our post-modern situation is a painful awareness that
we create the landscape with our gaze. But also, increasingly, with
our bulldozers. And therein lie the problems of tomorrow. Landscape
can no longer be a means of escape from history, from society, from
ideology, into a world of unmediated, unproblematic experience.
Nature no longer seems the Divine Other, as it did to the Romantics.
The Sublime is barely an option, except with a heavy coating of
irony, sugaring the bitter pill of loss. Nature today is so enmeshed
with Culture, and the planet so contaminated with our presence that
neither the upper surfaces of the atmosphere nor the deepest parts
of the ocean are free from our toxic wastes. Nature is no longer
wilderness, but rather our spoiled, soiled back yard. Our Second
Nature. Human Nature. |
