David Bellingham, A Plank Within the Trunk
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Sans Facon, Views of the West Coast of Scotland
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KILLIKILLING NG FIEFIELDS LDS
John Calcutt
Cézanne in Aix-en-Provence, Braque in L’Estaque, Picasso in Horta de San Juan. Each attack of paint a small death: each brave stroke another loss. Modern painting emerged triumphant from the annihilation of the landscape. The critical historians largely agree; modern art was fuelled by the powers of negation, cancellation and sacrifice. Fixed-point perspective, the single, unifying light source, fluent tonal gradation: these were among the early casualties, and their demise signalled the end of nature as the gold standard of art. Pursued to extinction, nature survives only as a memory. The genre of independent landscape was a relatively late arrival in the history of western art, but it was first to fall. Bundled and choppy, Cézanne’s deposits of paint turned airy expanse into dense, suffocating, fractured planar slabs. The sky was a weight, the distance a presence. An edge of green foliage trapped behind a blue tessera of sky; the horizon both near and far. And moments of bare canvas, each repeating the fact of the painting, exposing the limits of nature’s authority. ! Looking, seeing, checking, marking; looking, seeing, checking, erasing: Cézanne’s interminable labour took place beneath the blazing Provenal sun. In the terminology of his day, he worked ‘en plein air’ and ‘after nature’. What separated Cézanne from his followers, such as Braque and Picasso, were Cézannes. For him, his labour in the presence of the motif was primarily an experience of process; for them, on the other hand, the experience was focused upon his products, those finished paintings hung in a gallery. Inspired by Cézanne’s example, the young Braque produced a series of landscape paintings based upon a visit to L’Estaque in the summer of 1908. The final works, however, were produced from memory in his Paris studio. Ochres, khakis, russets and greens, the colours of military camouflage: Braque’s dun landscapes are not only doubly screened against raw nature (once by Cézanne’s example, and once again by the delay of memory), they also wish to be screens – diversions, dissimulations – in their own right. As with camouflage and mimicry in the natural world, however, the point is never simply to vanish from sight (if so it would be a particularly unsuccessful strategy; the stomachs of predators are full of vainly camouflaged prey). The camouflaged object or being surrenders its own subjective occupation of space in order to align itself with some ‘other’ co-ordinates. Rather than inhabiting space, it tries to become space. ‘It is no longer the origin of the co-ordinates,’ claimed
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Roger Caillois, ‘but one point among others; it is dispossessed of its privilege and literally no longer knows where to place itself.’ The landscape will find itself, however, in an unexpected place. ! Braque’s and Picasso’s Cubist landscapes were not large paintings, they were not panoramic by any means. In fact, in conformity with usual gallery practice at that time, the artists were paid a fixed fee on the basis of the size of their canvases. These canvases were prefabricated in 20 standard formats, the larger commanding the higher prices. Generally speaking, Braque’s and Picasso’s landscape paintings during the period c.1908 – c.1910 fell within the range 55cm x 46cm to 100cm x 81 cm (Picasso’s gallery paying more than Braque’s). There is something telling in these dimensions. For example, it is apparent from the convention of height preceding width in the recording of canvas sizes that Picasso and Braque selected an upright format for their landscapes. More precisely, to use the relevant parlance, they adopted – unexpectedly – the Portrait (Figure) format in preference to the Landscape (Paysage) format (in which width is greater than height). Thus they transposed the conventions associated with the ‘natural’ (the landscape) into those associated with the ‘cultural’ (the world of human agents, the figure). In rotating the axis of the pictorial field by ninety degrees, a set of fundamental relations is inverted. Quite simply, the world of nature as signified by the extended horizontal is displaced by the world of human value as signified by the vertical. Human clay, we rose from the primordial slime, long centuries toil to stand erect. This defeat of horizontality equals civilisation, the triumph of mind over matter. The snake, that lowest of creatures, agent of our ancient guilt and fear, slithers across the earth’s surface, every sinister inch of its slippery belly caressing the cold earth. The brutish quadrupeds – dogs, tigers, goats, pigs and wolves among their number – rise slightly above the dirt, but their low-slung bodies still echo the oppressive line of the horizon. Anatomy is destiny, we hear, and in raising itself onto hind legs Homo Erectus entered into a new relation with his body, and thus with the world and its other inhabitants. The mouth was now swivelled into a different axial relation to the rectum (both its own and that of other species). The head was elevated from the low, horizontal plane of urgent bodily functions to the pinnacle of a new vertical system of detached contemplation. Seeing and considering gradually came to replace smelling and
John C.Dalziel + Scullion, Eneregy
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reflex responses. The escape from nature had begun. ! Writing in 1972, Leo Steinberg identified a remarkable transition in the post-1950s works of Robert Rauschenberg: ‘We can still hang [these] pictures [yet they] no longer simulate vertical fields, but opaque flatbed horizontals. They no more depend on head-totoe correspondence with human posture than a newspaper does. The flatbed picture plane makes its symbolic allusion to hard surfaces such as tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin boards – any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information may be received, printed, impressed – whether coherently or in confusion.’ Intimations of this radical shift may be detected, Steinberg notes, in Cubism; ‘[b]ut these last works were small objects; the “thingness” of them was appropriate to their size.’ If we draw together some of the key features and terms identified by Steinberg, we might summarise the defining characteristics of these new works as follows: although they may be hung vertically, our imaginative relation to them operates on the horizontal plane; their surfaces function as receptors of imprinted information; they possess (in the case of Cubism, at least) the quality of ‘thingness’. Steinberg himself ventures a comparison between such works and newspapers, but we might want to extend this claim. Our physical and psychical relation to such works has much in common with our relation to books. There are differences, of course, between these relations, but the experience offered by the modern picture – as developed by Picasso and Braque in their landscape paintings – demand new modes of response. There is a radical shift, for example, from an experience of presence (we are standing in front of the ‘actual’ scene) to one of absence (we are standing in front of a densely encoded replacement for that scene). And because the tattered remains of pictorial space no longer appear to be co-extensive with that occupied by the viewer, the picture becomes spatially detached from its physical location and is thereby released into a condition of portability (it ‘no longer knows where to place itself’). As a consequence of these disruptions, the image begins to relate to external reality in a manner similar to that of the word: by means of indirectness and conceptual, rather than sensory, attachment. Thus the relevant model of the pictorial image is no longer that of the transparent, enframing window, but of the opaque book to be read and ‘decoded’ in a private and solitary mode. Further confirmation of the significance of this virtual toppling from the vertical plane to the horizontal plane (which may be thought of as a ‘superimposition’ on the Cubists’ actual axial rotation from the horizontal to the vertical) is provided by Walter Benjamin. In his short essay ‘Painting and the Graphic Arts’ Benjamin states: We might say there are two sections through the substance of the world: the longitudinal section of painting and the cross-section of certain pieces of graphic art. The longitudinal
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section seems representational; it somehow contains the objects. The cross-section seems symbolic; it contains signs. Or is it only when we read that we place the page horizontally before us? And is there such a thing as an original vertical position for writing – say, for engraving in stone? Of course, what matters here is not the merely external fact but the spirit: is it actually possible to base the problem on the simple principle that pictures are set vertically and signs horizontally, even though we may follow the development of this through changing metaphorical relations through the ages? ! The landscape is dead: Long live the landscape. Beyond the reach of clear thought, nature is one of our greatest worries, a boundless source of primordial anxiety. Like the sharp gleam in an animal’s eye, we do not know what it ‘is’ or what it means. In fact, we are distressed by the thought that it may mean nothing whatsoever. Worse still, perhaps: its obscure meaning may take no account of us at all. Alarming in its excessive presence, it must be contained, managed, humanised, domesticated. The very notion of the landscape art itself – as a set of rules and conventions within representation – is an attempt to make it submit to our demands. ‘The’ world must become ‘our’ world. In ‘picturing’ nature by means of the conventions of landscape we strive to deny its utterly alien and obdurate reality. We want to turn it into a place, and then provide it with a place. Landscape is thus a denial of nature’s spatial and temporal infinitude, a refusal to confront its absolute Otherness, its fundamental meaninglessness, the finality of its indifference. But this denial – this disavowal – offers only the weakest of protection: ‘... the ego often enough finds itself in the position of fending off some demand from the external world which it feels distressing and this is effected by means of a disavowal of the perceptions which bring to knowledge this demand from reality. Disavowals of this kind occur very often ... and whenever we are in a position to study them they turn out to be halfmeasures, incomplete attempts at detachment from reality.’ [Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 1938] As the nineteenth century edged into the twentieth, the strain began to tell. Disintegrating under unrelenting pressure from the real, the forms of landscape painting mutated abruptly. On the canvases of Cézanne and the Cubists landscape underwent a series of seismic upheavals. The horizontal axis flipped to the vertical, the illusion of deep space gave way to the assertion of the painting’s flat planar surface, and airy opticality ceded to an opaque tactility. The image was no longer an invitation to imaginatively enter the depicted scene, as if on a stroll, it had become an increasingly impenetrable barrier. Nature was thus reduced to a
Carol Rhodes, Car port, 2003, 58 x 67cm
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David Bellingham,Tensioned to a vanishing point; pylons
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Ilana Halperin, Nomadic Landmass (Ferdinandea), 2003, 36.5 x 47.5 inch
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kind of material ‘thingness’, a kind of portable text available for a new mode of scrutiny. Those previous analogies for the landscape painting’s relation to external reality – the window and the mirror – had been rendered redundant. Henceforth, we must think of such a relation in terms derived from the practices of reading and cryptography. Above all, perhaps, we should think of the map. ! For a century or more, then, the landscape has only been available in art as a ghostly apparition. It has been killed so that we may live at ease with its memory. Some, of course, refuse to accept this death, preferring instead to act as if nothing had changed. Others do not mourn the loss, they succumb to melancholy. ‘If mourning implies an active working through of a loss,’ Andreas Huyssen writes, ‘then melancholy is characterised by an inability to overcome that loss and in some instances even a continuing identification with the lost object of love.’ Landscape continues to exert a fascination, but pictorial strategies based upon disavowal and melancholy amount to no more than retrogressive falsifications. Attempts to resurrect landscape as a symbolic barrier against the real must be resisted. Landscape as the living dead must be killed again and again, by whatever means become necessary. We must always be reminded that nature is an aspect of the real that has no final resting place. ! EPISODES FROM THE AFTERLIFE Jackson Pollock develops a technique whereby he drips, pours and flicks paint onto canvases laid horizontally on the studio floor. Despite their occasionally nature-inspired titles, such as Enchanted Forest, Sea Change, or Summertime, the paintings are ‘abstract’. It seems as if Pollock can only access nature indirectly, through the words of his titles, through his summoning of the horizontal plane of the ground. Lost from the field of representation, nature reappears in an unexpected location. In 1942 Pollock utters his famous claim: ‘I am nature.’ How to approach the depiction of landscape when it has receded beyond the grasp of the image? In 1961 Jasper Johns will not set up his easel in the great outdoors, he will instead make a painting of a map of America. The brush strokes in Map are agitated and febrile, as if they could somehow breathe life into this image of an image. If nature will not submit to representation, why not deal with it in a direct, interventionist manner? Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969) consists of two slots dug into the Nevada desert, each 40 feet deep and 100 feet long. In Wrapped Coast (1969), Christo and Jeanne-Claude used 93 square kilometres of erosion control fabric to cover an area of rocky coastline at Little Bay, Australia. What common feature do these
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works share? Unable to confine nature within the limits of the picture, they physically remove parts of it, they mask or obscure it. Unable, in other words, to convert it into a figure within a frame, they disfigure it. Gerhard Richter painted the alpine scene St. Moritz in 1992. It is a meticulously painted reproduction (enlarged) of a photograph. More precisely, it is a meticulously painted reproduction of a blurred, out of focus photograph. There is a perceptual paradox here: the surface of a painting cannot be out of focus (except to a viewer with defective eyesight). The real landscape to which the painting refers thus evades complete capture, it seems both present and absent at the same time. A moment’s reflection forces us to modify the previous observation. The painting’s access to the real landscape is blocked by the photograph, and it is this delay which thus constitutes the painting’s actual subject. In Views of the West Coast of Scotland (2001), Sans Faon (Charles Blanc and Tristan Surtees) hunt nature by night, as if it were a nocturnal animal. Four photographer’s lamps throw a blazing pool of light into the ink black undergrowth. A patch of nature is caught by surprise, but still it has nothing to reveal beyond the simple fact of its being ‘here’. There is a sense that something will be or has been shot at this site: a movie or a professional photograph, perhaps. Then again, it could be the undead figure of nature, taking another shot to the head.
David Bellingham, the telegraph pole
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