Another short post on a contemporary artist drawing imaginary landscapes: Frank Magnotta. According to Dominic Molon in Vitamin D, Magnotta's drawings reflect 'the staggeringly constant turnover of the contemporary American landscape in the past fifty years, resulting from the heightened cycles of real estate development and relentless urban gentrification' leading to 'a national sense of perpetual unsettledness'. Many of these feature architectural fantasies set against an empty background, like Post (2007), which can be seen accompanying an interview in Fecal Face magazine, where Magnotta says 'in the U.S. I'm not sure that we really build monuments any more, but in a way popular culture is the great ephemeral American monument. I'm interested in giving form to that.'
Sometimes he'll draw in a surreal landscape background, as in the recent Grand Optimist. In The Overlook (2004) buildings are entierly absent. This drawing 'features a vast snowy landscape with such phrases as as HERITAGE HILLS, CRYSTAL LAKE, and GOLDEN ROSE placed at various points within the image. Divorced from the assumed villaages that the phrases herald, the names become empty signifiers, meaningless ascriptions of perceived exclusivity and privelege that speak more to our desire for the trappings of wealth and prestige than the actual ability of language or objects to provide such bounty' (Dominic Molon).
Friday, July 17, 2009
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Thames Film
I spent a happy evening with a friend yesterday eating Il Bacio pizzas and watching the BFI's DVD compilation of William Raban films. It includes his 66 minute long documentary Thames Film (1986), which flows from the city of London to the mouth of the river and ends with the incredible science fiction landscape of the Thames estuary seaforts. The film was partly inspired by T.S. Eliot and includes lines from Four Quartets read by the poet. The inclusion of poetry like this is familiar from other landscape and city documentaries - Terence Davies' Of Time and the City (2008) is just one recent example. More striking, I think, is Raban's clever use of Breughel's painting The Triumph of Death which the camera pans over (in a manner reminiscent of Tarkovsky in Solaris) at several points in the film, revealing a series of links between the river's dark past and Breughel's apocalyptic vision.
Pieter Breughel the Elder, The Triumph of Death, c1562
Peter Ackroyd (inevitably) is an admirer of Thames Film and you can read his essay at the Luxonline site for William Raban. He says, for example, that it is 'in many respects it is a visionary film. There are moments of light and colour that lift the spirit with exaltation. There are giant shapes and structures that fill the mind with awe. There are passages of mist and turbulence that recall the primaeval Thames of swamps and marshes. The multifold images of the river run through this film like the currents and tides of the water itself. It is a film, in every sense, of great fluency. The sounds, as well as the images, of the river are of great importance. There is a continual clangour, a loud lament, with the sound of machinery fighting against the lap of the water and the cry of the seagulls.'
Thames estuary seaforts, from Thames Film
William Raban has been making landscape films since Sky (1970) and River Yar (1971-72 a collaboration with Chris Welsby). He says 'the first films I made were extensions to my work as a painter. The paintings involved taking impressions from natural surfaces like waves and tree bark. For the 'Tree Print' series canvas was left installed on tree trunks for long periods to weather and discolour. The films made at this time had a similar naturalistic approach towards documenting changes, and were mostly static views of landscapes where various 'time-lapse' systems were used to make slow movements like the rise and drop of tide levels and development of cloud patterns clearly perceptible.'
In the wake of these early experimental works, he has, in addition to Thames Film, made a sequence of films that have charted the changing face of London and its river:
- Thames Barrier (1977) - a synchronised three-screen time-lapse film of the river during the building of the Thames Barrier
- Sundial (1992) - the tower of Canary Wharf filmed as a giant gnomon to mark the passing of a day
- A13 (1994) - a Vertov-influenced commentary-free sequence showing the construction of Limehouse Road Link and its effects on the local landscape
- Beating the Bridges (1998) - another river film in which thirty Thames bridges provide 'a range of acoustic space that is featured on the soundtrack by the ambient reverb and a live percussion score'
- MM (2002) - like A13, another quietly polemical film about the changing cityscape, this time focusing on the creation of the Millenium Dome
The Millenium Dome, from MM
Friday, July 10, 2009
From Murano Grande
This is one of a few posts I'm going to do on contemporary drawn landscapes, based on Phaidon's excellent survey Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing. Emma Dexter's introduction to the book examines the open possibilities of drawing today - in contrast to photography this archaic form is now 'an under-regarded and under-theorized backwater.' The definition of drawing can be stretched from pictures made with pencil and paper to inscribed landscapes (she reproduces Richard Long's A Line Made by Walking where the earth is revealed 'as a surface or ground to be marked, etched, and scarred by the body as the instrument of drawing, taking the role of pencil or pen.') However, the artists I'll mention here have been concerned with drawing in the traditional sense, depicting imaginary landscapes in a medium that can convey formal precision, satirical bite or childlike innocence.
The first of these is Cuban artist Glexis Novoa, who now lives in Miami. Here is an extract from Rubén Gallo's discussion of his work. 'Rem Koolhaas once wrote that in the future, all cities will be generic, as bland and nondescript as airports. Many of Novoa's drawn landscapes, including From Murano Grande (2002) depict the generic city of the future: unspecific urban spaces that could be located in Europe or America, in India or Africa. The cityscapes seem ostensibly prosperous - the buildings are tall, the streets are clean - but are entirely devoid of life. There is not a single soul on the streets. The cemetery-like coldness of these environments is further intensified by the artist's choice of slabs of marble as support for his drawings. Novoa provokes our thoughts: Are these dehumanized cities what the future holds in store? Or are they already a reality in many parts of the world?'
Looking around for an image of this work on the web, I see it is possible to buy a From Murano Grande scarf. Here are three more Glexis Novoa landscapes from the artist's website:
The first of these is Cuban artist Glexis Novoa, who now lives in Miami. Here is an extract from Rubén Gallo's discussion of his work. 'Rem Koolhaas once wrote that in the future, all cities will be generic, as bland and nondescript as airports. Many of Novoa's drawn landscapes, including From Murano Grande (2002) depict the generic city of the future: unspecific urban spaces that could be located in Europe or America, in India or Africa. The cityscapes seem ostensibly prosperous - the buildings are tall, the streets are clean - but are entirely devoid of life. There is not a single soul on the streets. The cemetery-like coldness of these environments is further intensified by the artist's choice of slabs of marble as support for his drawings. Novoa provokes our thoughts: Are these dehumanized cities what the future holds in store? Or are they already a reality in many parts of the world?'
Looking around for an image of this work on the web, I see it is possible to buy a From Murano Grande scarf. Here are three more Glexis Novoa landscapes from the artist's website:
- N.E.O. New Economic Order (2005)
- City of North Havana (2006)
- Swampyville (2008)
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
Landscape futures
Geoff Manaugh was in London today to launch the BLDGBLOG book, so I popped over to the Architectural Association this evening to hear him give an entertaining whistle-stop tour of its contents. It had been a day of strange weather with a massive downpour earlier, like something out of the book's 'Redesigning the Sky' chapter (aggressive cloud seeding during the Vietnam War). The book is fascinating and beautiful to look at, with a lot of on landscapes and soundscapes. Some of the people I've discussed here before crop up - Simon Norfolk, Christian Bök, W.G. Sebald, J. G. Ballard (of course). So here are Ten More Reasons to read the book (in addition to those given on the BLDGBLOG site) - examples of the book's 'architectural conjecture :: urban speculation :: landscape futures'.
The idea that...
- the Mesolithic landscape of Doggerland, which lies under the North Sea, could be made to re-emerge behind massive ring cities in the form of hydrological projects, encircling the flooded landscape
- John Milton anticipated the Manhattan Project in his description of the preparations for 'an insurrectionary terrorist invasion of Heaven' in Paradise Lost - a 'mineral activation of the Earth as a resource for high-tech weaponry'
- the fountains of Rome could be turned into a sequence of liquid cinemas
- a kind of Sir John Soane museum of historically important architectural fragments culd be established, exhibiting items like the window JFK was shot from, detached like a Gordon Matta-Clark building cut
- a new set of sound mirrors should be built in the landscape to create specific sounds at specific times - 'a distant gully that moans every year in the second week of November'
- bands should start doing cover versions of environmental sound recordings - Godspeed You! Black Emperor providing a perfect rendition of a Brian Eno recording of Bayswater Road
- Rachel Whiteread should begin filling whole cave systems with plaster
- with a version of the inflatable architecture designed by Swiss architecture firm Instant, you could inflate 'an entire borough that has never otherwise existed, sprawling across the marshy plains of east London. Call it Hackney 2, or Stoke Airington' (a reference to Stoke Newington, where I'm now sitting and writing this)
- hurricanes could be averted by storing winds in an Aeolian Reef, inspired by the 'weather breeding isle' in Virgil's Aeneid: 'Here in a vast cavern King Aeolus /Rules the contending winds and moaning gales /As warden of their prison. Round the walls / They chafe and bluster underground. The din /Makes a great mountain murmer overhead...'
- 'a distant heir of J. M. W. Turner returns sunburnt from the tropics to find London an archipelago of failed sea walls and waterlogged high-rises, the suburbs an intricate filigree of uninhabited canals, bonded warehousing forming atolls amidst sandbanks and deltas'
Saturday, July 04, 2009
So foul a sky clears not without a storm
'In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of Sulaco -the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity-had never been commercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides and indigo.' This is the euphonious opening sentence to Joseph Conrad's Nostromo (its rhythm reminds me of the famous declaration at the start of The Adventures of Augie March “I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go about things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way.”)
Conrad spends the whole of the first chapter describing the landscape of Sulaco and the Golfo Placido: scene setting, yes, but also a sign that this novel's ambition includes the creation of a completely believable South American country in all its details. Here, for example, is Conrad's first mention of the Cordillera - mountains which have isolated Sulaco from the effects of Civil War until the turbulent events of the novel:
'On crossing the imaginary line drawn from Punta Mala to Azuera the ships from Europe bound to Sulaco lose at once the strong breezes of the ocean. They become the prey of capricious airs that play with them for thirty hours at a stretch sometimes. Before them the head of the calm gulf is filled on most days of the year by a great body of motionless and opaque clouds. On the rare clear mornings another shadow is cast upon the sweep of the gulf. The dawn breaks high behind the towering and serrated wall of the Cordillera, a clear-cut vision of dark peaks rearing their steep slopes on a lofty pedestal of forest rising from the very edge of the shore. Amongst them the white head of Higuerota rises majestically upon the blue. Bare clusters of enormous rocks sprinkle with tiny black dots the smooth dome of snow.'
The landscape in this first chapter will impact on the narrative and, literally in the case of the Cordellera, cast a shadow on Nostromo's characters. Conrad describes the political struggle for this territory, the transformation brought about by foreign capital and the coming of the railway, and the exploitation of its natural resources in the form of the increasingly productive silver mine. But like a Turner history painting it also registers the fleeting effects of sunlight and atmosphere: clouds are often described and the novel begins with a quotation from Shakespeare, "So foul a sky clears not without a storm."
At one key point in the novel, the landscape disappears altogether, as Decoud and Nostromo try to spirit away the mine's silver in a small boat in the misty silence of night: 'A great recrudescence of obscurity embraced the boat. The sea in the gulf was as black as the clouds above. Nostromo, after striking a couple of matches to get a glimpse of the boat-compass he had with him in the lighter, steered by the feel of the wind on his cheek. It was a new experience for Decoud, this mysteriousness of the great waters spread out strangely smooth, as if their restlessness had been crushed by the weight of that dense night...'
The novel actually contains a landscape painting - a vision of the country before the mine was developed, captured by the wife of the mine administrator, Charles Gould. 'The waterfall existed no longer. The tree-ferns that had luxuriated in its spray had died around the dried-up pool, and the high ravine was only a big trench half filled up with the refuse of excavations and tailings. The torrent, dammed up above, sent its water rushing along the open flumes of scooped tree trunks striding on trestle-legs to the turbines working the stamps on the lower plateau--the mesa grande of the San Tome mountain. Only the memory of the waterfall, with its amazing fernery, like a hanging garden above the rocks of the gorge, was preserved in Mrs. Gould's water-colour sketch; she had made it hastily one day from a cleared patch in the bushes, sitting in the shade of a roof of straw erected for her on three rough poles under Don Pepe's direction.'
It is like a description of Eden - a comparison made explicit when Mrs Gould looks at the landscape visible now only in this watercolour:
"Ah, if we had left it alone, Charley!"
"No," Charles Gould said, moodily; "it was impossible to leave it alone."
"Perhaps it was impossible," Mrs. Gould admitted, slowly. Her lips quivered a little, but she smiled with an air of dainty bravado. "We have disturbed a good many snakes in that Paradise, Charley, haven't we?"
Conrad spends the whole of the first chapter describing the landscape of Sulaco and the Golfo Placido: scene setting, yes, but also a sign that this novel's ambition includes the creation of a completely believable South American country in all its details. Here, for example, is Conrad's first mention of the Cordillera - mountains which have isolated Sulaco from the effects of Civil War until the turbulent events of the novel:
'On crossing the imaginary line drawn from Punta Mala to Azuera the ships from Europe bound to Sulaco lose at once the strong breezes of the ocean. They become the prey of capricious airs that play with them for thirty hours at a stretch sometimes. Before them the head of the calm gulf is filled on most days of the year by a great body of motionless and opaque clouds. On the rare clear mornings another shadow is cast upon the sweep of the gulf. The dawn breaks high behind the towering and serrated wall of the Cordillera, a clear-cut vision of dark peaks rearing their steep slopes on a lofty pedestal of forest rising from the very edge of the shore. Amongst them the white head of Higuerota rises majestically upon the blue. Bare clusters of enormous rocks sprinkle with tiny black dots the smooth dome of snow.'
The landscape in this first chapter will impact on the narrative and, literally in the case of the Cordellera, cast a shadow on Nostromo's characters. Conrad describes the political struggle for this territory, the transformation brought about by foreign capital and the coming of the railway, and the exploitation of its natural resources in the form of the increasingly productive silver mine. But like a Turner history painting it also registers the fleeting effects of sunlight and atmosphere: clouds are often described and the novel begins with a quotation from Shakespeare, "So foul a sky clears not without a storm."
At one key point in the novel, the landscape disappears altogether, as Decoud and Nostromo try to spirit away the mine's silver in a small boat in the misty silence of night: 'A great recrudescence of obscurity embraced the boat. The sea in the gulf was as black as the clouds above. Nostromo, after striking a couple of matches to get a glimpse of the boat-compass he had with him in the lighter, steered by the feel of the wind on his cheek. It was a new experience for Decoud, this mysteriousness of the great waters spread out strangely smooth, as if their restlessness had been crushed by the weight of that dense night...'
The novel actually contains a landscape painting - a vision of the country before the mine was developed, captured by the wife of the mine administrator, Charles Gould. 'The waterfall existed no longer. The tree-ferns that had luxuriated in its spray had died around the dried-up pool, and the high ravine was only a big trench half filled up with the refuse of excavations and tailings. The torrent, dammed up above, sent its water rushing along the open flumes of scooped tree trunks striding on trestle-legs to the turbines working the stamps on the lower plateau--the mesa grande of the San Tome mountain. Only the memory of the waterfall, with its amazing fernery, like a hanging garden above the rocks of the gorge, was preserved in Mrs. Gould's water-colour sketch; she had made it hastily one day from a cleared patch in the bushes, sitting in the shade of a roof of straw erected for her on three rough poles under Don Pepe's direction.'
It is like a description of Eden - a comparison made explicit when Mrs Gould looks at the landscape visible now only in this watercolour:
"Ah, if we had left it alone, Charley!"
"No," Charles Gould said, moodily; "it was impossible to leave it alone."
"Perhaps it was impossible," Mrs. Gould admitted, slowly. Her lips quivered a little, but she smiled with an air of dainty bravado. "We have disturbed a good many snakes in that Paradise, Charley, haven't we?"
Monday, June 29, 2009
Straight Miles and Meandering Miles
The catalogue to the Richard Long exhibition Heaven and Earth, which I discussed here recently, draws attention to Long's early career at art school, when he first developed the ideas that have motivated his art ever since. Long has recalled one important influence at the time was John Cage. He saw Cage lecture at the Saville Theatre in November 1966: 'It was all about chance and eccentric lateral thinking and humour - all sorts of John Cage ideas which were new to me.' A year later he experienced a recorded lecture, Indeterminacy, in which Cage told sixty stories in sixty minutes, varying the pace according to the length of the story. As Clarrie Wallis points out, this procedure is similar to that used in Cage's map work A Walk of Four Hours and Four Circles (1972), where concentric circles were each walked in one hour (the smallest circle slowest, the largest fastest).
Thinking of avant garde composers in this context, I was reminded of La Monte Young's Compositions 1960 - an early example of conceptual art as instructions, e.g.
#2: Build a fire in front of the audience…
or
#5: Turn a butterfly (or any number of butterflies) loose in the performance area. When the composition is over, be sure to allow the butterfly to fly away outside…
One of these compositions sounds like a Richard Long walk:
#10: Draw a straight line and follow it
You could imagine one of Long's early map works re-written in this way as instructions for an imaginary walker:
A Ten Mile Walk, England, 1968
1. Pick a starting point x
2. Pick a round number y
3. Draw a straight line from x of length y in a direction that it is possible to walk
4. Walk the line
Of course the fact that Long has done his walks is the whole point. It is his landscape experience that we are presented with, even though we can accompany him in our imagination (just as we can join Gary Snyder on the riprap trail, or Basho on the narrow road). His work is not participative in the style of contemporary relational aesthetics. Still, while I'm on this road not taken, here are four more Richard Long walks recast as instructions. They might come in useful if you are short of ideas this summer, and, adapted for cities, they could even be used as the basis for some Situationist dérives...
A Walk of Four Hours and Four Circles, England, 1972
1. Draw a circle a on the map of diameter x
2. Superimpose a second circle b centred on the same spot with diameter 3x
3. Superimpose 2 more circles c and d with diameters 5x and 7x
4. Spend exactly an hour walking each of the four circles
A Hundred Tors in a Hundred Hours, Devon, England, 1976
1. Pick a distinctive common land form
2. Locate a round number of them, x
3. Walk to all of them in exactly x hours
A Five Day Walk, England, 1980
1. Choose a route that is x miles
2. Walk 1/15 of this distance x on the first day
3. On the second and subsequent days walk 2/15, 3/15, 4/15 and 5/15 of the distance
Straight Miles and Meandering Miles, England, 1985
1. Choose a long distance walk
2. Map out a certain number of locations where it is possible to walk a straight mile
3. Walk the route by, alternatively, normal paths and straight lines
Thinking of avant garde composers in this context, I was reminded of La Monte Young's Compositions 1960 - an early example of conceptual art as instructions, e.g.
#2: Build a fire in front of the audience…
or
#5: Turn a butterfly (or any number of butterflies) loose in the performance area. When the composition is over, be sure to allow the butterfly to fly away outside…
One of these compositions sounds like a Richard Long walk:
#10: Draw a straight line and follow it
You could imagine one of Long's early map works re-written in this way as instructions for an imaginary walker:
A Ten Mile Walk, England, 1968
1. Pick a starting point x
2. Pick a round number y
3. Draw a straight line from x of length y in a direction that it is possible to walk
4. Walk the line
Of course the fact that Long has done his walks is the whole point. It is his landscape experience that we are presented with, even though we can accompany him in our imagination (just as we can join Gary Snyder on the riprap trail, or Basho on the narrow road). His work is not participative in the style of contemporary relational aesthetics. Still, while I'm on this road not taken, here are four more Richard Long walks recast as instructions. They might come in useful if you are short of ideas this summer, and, adapted for cities, they could even be used as the basis for some Situationist dérives...
A Walk of Four Hours and Four Circles, England, 1972
1. Draw a circle a on the map of diameter x
2. Superimpose a second circle b centred on the same spot with diameter 3x
3. Superimpose 2 more circles c and d with diameters 5x and 7x
4. Spend exactly an hour walking each of the four circles
A Hundred Tors in a Hundred Hours, Devon, England, 1976
1. Pick a distinctive common land form
2. Locate a round number of them, x
3. Walk to all of them in exactly x hours
A Five Day Walk, England, 1980
1. Choose a route that is x miles
2. Walk 1/15 of this distance x on the first day
3. On the second and subsequent days walk 2/15, 3/15, 4/15 and 5/15 of the distance
Straight Miles and Meandering Miles, England, 1985
1. Choose a long distance walk
2. Map out a certain number of locations where it is possible to walk a straight mile
3. Walk the route by, alternatively, normal paths and straight lines
Friday, June 26, 2009
The horizon of Holland
Back in 1965 the ICA organised an exhibition called 'Between Poetry and Painting' which included work by Ian Hamilton Finlay. Forty-four years later the ICA now has a similar exhibition entitled 'Poor. Old. Tired. Horse.', named after Ian Hamilton Finlay's magazine of that title. In addition to Ian Hamilton Finlay, the new exhibition includes work by two other artists I've discussed here before, Robert Smithson and Carl Andre. I've just taken the photo above which shows the catalogue for the 1965 exhibition next to the catalogue for the current show (which takes the form of a magazine called 'Roland'). The earlier exhibition took place before I was born but I think my uncle must have been to it and so the catalogue has found its way into my library. At that time Ian Hamilton Finlay had not yet moved to Stonypath to start work on the garden that would become Little Sparta - the catalogue says simply that he 'has lived in Perthshire, Orkney and Edinburgh, and now lives in the north of Scotland.'
On Tuesday Stephen Bann came to the ICA to give a talk about Ian Hamilton Finlay. He focused on the pre-Stonypath period and included some never-published colour photographs that he had been unable to use in an Architectural Review article (it was only printed in black and white in those days). One of these photographs showed THE HORIZON OF HOLLAND IS ALL EARS, a concrete poem made into a wooden structure and placed in the garden of Finlay's home in Ross-shire. This is the first of Finlay's interventions in the landscape, the ancestor of the sculptures at Little Sparta.
There were several references in the talk to Finlay's poetic interests and links with contemporaries like Lorine Niedecker. Finlay wrote to Bann saying that the landscape of Orkney was equivalent to a Wallace Stevens poem. He also said that Orkney resembled concrete poetry, whilst Perthshire seemed more like the writing German poets like Trakl. The less particularised landscape of Ross-shire on the other hand required more effort to make a poem out of the place... the kind of effort Ian Hamilton Finlay put there into making his first artist garden and his first poem in the landscape.
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