SANDA ILIESCU
Sanda Iliescu teaches art and architecture at the University of Virginia. Educated as an architect, she is a practicing artist who has exhibited her paintings, drawings, and collages in the United States and Europe. She is the editor of The Hand and the Soul: Aesthetics and Ethics in Architecture and Art and the author of Experiencing Art and Architecture: Lessons on Looking. She has received numerous awards, among them the Rome Prize.
Opposite: Landscapes of Waste (2009), created using leftover materials and detritus (graphite dust, pencil shavings, etc.) collected during the drawing process for Poem Drawing
i s it still possible to create a meaningful picture of a landscape? Can an artist in our time of environmental crisis make a drawing or painting that is true to both nature’s beauty and its desperate fragility?
The problem is not only that the beautiful drawings and paintings that have come down to us from the past may seem inadequate to us because they fail to address the kind of dangers that our natural world faces today, it is also that the very system of linear perspective that many of these works of art rely upon evokes a degree of human control and mastery over nature that we may now consider problematic. This sense of mastery comes from the perspectival system and the way it revolves around the creation of an implied ideal observer, one who dominates the land and indeed shapes it according to their will. Seen from the point of view of this observer, nature becomes an orderly construct, one structured around a single horizon, a finite number of vanishing points, and, very often, a tripartite division of space into foreground, middle ground, and background. In these pictures, the artist arrests the landscape and reduces it to an image seen in a single moment in time by a single observer at a particular location in space. Because the sense of time in this system is so fixed, there is no easy way to convey nature’s continual transformation. Neither is there an easy way to evoke the complex multisensory experiences of a place – to highlight the richness of the sense of smell, hearing, touch, temperature, humidity, and air movements among other intertwined perceptions and sensations. Classical Western images of landscapes tend to deny this fluidity and project onto nature instead a sense of coherence and completeness – an absence of the element of change. Their beauty—their enchantment—has much to do with this sense of stillness and composure.
The story of modern art in the West—and of modern depictions of nature—is a story of the dismantling of the system of linear perspective, with its implications of closure, fixity, and privileged visuality. Through abstraction, performance art, earthworks, collaborative and participatory projects, and socially engaged work, modern and contemporary artists have created compelling alternatives to the traditional perspectival picture of nature.1
In my own landscape drawings, I seek to counter the perspectival system by exploring ideas of formal openness and incompleteness and, at times, by making and exhibiting works of art that are unfinished. Many of my nature drawings
Poem Drawing: A Little Less Returned for Him Each Spring, No. 1
Poem Drawing series (2002 to present) is created with graphite and colored pencil on paper, 12 in. x 20.5 in.
Poem Drawing: A Little Less Returned for Him Each Spring, No. 13
Poem Drawing: A Little Less Returned for Him Each Spring, No. 2
Poem Drawing: A Little Less Returned for Him Each Spring, No. 14
Poem Drawing: A Little Less Returned for Him Each Spring, No. 5
Poem Drawing: A Little Less Returned for Him Each Spring, No. 19
Poem Drawing: A Little Less Returned for Him Each Spring, No. 10
Poem Drawing: A Little Less Returned for Him Each Spring, No. 20
have been inspired by the work of German landscape architects Peter and Anneliese Latz and by their conception of the landscape as both open and unfinished. Peter Latz once told me that there was no such thing as a “finished” park or garden, and that there was no natural state that was ideal or desirable above all others.2 Rather, in nature, everything was always in flux: trees grew and matured, plants thrived or died off, new species took hold, levels of toxicity changed, soils deposited and eroded. As a result, there was no such thing as a fixed landscape, but rather a series of intertwined, unfolding processes. For the Latzes, the discipline of landscape architecture thus resists the closure of the finished artifact more than painting, music, literature, or architecture. For them, the work of the landscape architect must include not only an initial set of explorations and interventions but also the subsequent study of the consequences of those first design acts, as well the obligation to continue to propose potential new actions. Initial conjectures and interventions, they argue, must be reevaluated and revised in a process that remains fundamentally open.
The series of drawings I began in 2002 titled Poem Drawing: A Little Less Returned for Him Each Spring is my attempt to bring the Latzes’ open vision of landscape to a work of art. In them, I set out not so much to “draw” anything, but rather to enact a “drawing” process that, like a park or garden, unfolds over time and through a particular sequence of stages. The drawings take Wallace Stevens’s poem Anglaise Mort à Florence as their point of departure, a poem in eight stanzas and 24 lines that opens with the sentence “A little less returned for him each spring.” In response to the first line’s invocation of both growth (“spring”) and diminishment (“a little less”), I wrote and erased the poem repeatedly according to a set of simple instructions – a kind of script. The script went as follows: Write the poem on a piece of paper. Erase it. Write the poem on a second piece of paper, erase it, then rewrite it this time beginning one line down from the top and erase it again. Now, take a third piece of paper, do exactly what you did in the first two steps, then write and erase the poem a third time, this time beginning two lines down from the top of the page. And so on until 24 drawings have been made, every drawing in the series showing more erasures or a “little less” than the one before it.
Although I never sought to make Poem Drawing look like a landscape, the drawings as they evolved (especially the later ones) did begin to resemble one – the landscape of a Japanese
dry garden, perhaps, full of clouds and mists and objects appearing and disappearing. In other words, the drawings resemble landscapes not in the conventional pictorial sense created by linear perspective, but rather in the sense of landscape as the densely layered space of an evolving palimpsest – landscape as we might understand it today. The drawings’ evocation of place and atmosphere—their beauty, if one finds them beautiful—is, thus, not only a matter of appearance (the way the lines of the poem, for instance, may suggest multiple horizons), but is also borne of an open process: the process of repeatedly adding text (sedimentation) and subtracting it (erosion).
When will I finish Poem Drawing? Theoretically, I could have finished the drawings a long time ago. According to the drawing script, the project stops when the final drawing (# 24) contains the writing and erasure of the poem 24 times. But I take my time and only work on the project when I am moved to do so – and when I do work on the piece, I usually write and erase very slowly. Furthermore, since a part of me wants to keep the drawings “unfinished,” it is quite likely that Poem Drawing will end when I cease to exist. However, because the drawing actions—writing and erasing the poem multiple times—are so simple and easy to emulate, they may well be re-enacted by someone else at some point in the future. This artist would write and erase Stevens’s poem (or some other text), and then re-write and reerase it again, and again, and again…In this way, the project may survive the limits of its first implementation and may continue to exist as an idea and open possibility.
1 From the early modern period I have in mind artists such as Braque, Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, as well as Marcel Duchamp. Later in the 20th century, numerous artists challenged the classical Western landscape tradition, including Robert Smithson, Anselm Kiefer, Maya Lin, Ann Hamilton, and David Hammons.
2 I met Peter and Anneliese Latz when they visited the University of Virginia, where I teach, in 2002.
Right: Poem Drawing: A Little Less Returned for Him Each Spring, No. 1.