Some Landscapes

Trees into logs into smoke

2012-01-28T19:08:00.001Z

Last night I watched Michelangelo Frammartino's film Le Quattro Volte on DVD and have been boring people all day trying to convince them how wonderful it is. Reviewing it last year in The Independent, Jonathan Romney wrote that Le Quattro Volte 'will set you musing on matters natural and metaphysical, using little more than some Calabrian hillsides, a stack of logs, some snails and a herd of goats – and barely a syllable of dialogue. The film is an extraordinary achievement – beautiful, moving, mysterious, and, at times, extremely funny. In its self-effacing way, it's nothing short of a miracle – one of those rare works that break all the rules about what cinema "should" be in order to demonstrate what it can be.' He goes on to explain that 'the title – literally, the four "turns"or "phases" – refers to the world as described by Pythagorean philosophy, with its theory of a cycle of eternal transformation and reincarnation. What this means in practice is that Le Quattro Volte isn't about story, or character, or even action. Rather, this is a contemplative film about things changing into other things – like trees into logs into smoke – and about the cycle of natural changes, the internal clock by which the universe keeps time.'

In an interview for the DVD, Frammartino said, "I've tried to make the landscape the protagonist. I tried not to use it simply as background but to make it become something more important, to bring it out and elevate it to the level of protagonist. For example, in the film there's a moment in the first part, when our protagonist is still a man, an old shepherd. He's lying in the grass minding his own business when an ant starts walking over his face, over his cheekbones and up towards his eyes. The ant steals the scene and the man's face, in close-up, becomes a landscape. There's this reversal of roles. And then, a few scenes later, there's a landscape with the roofs of the village and a big tree emerging, the protagonist of the scene, with a little man climbing up it, as tiny as an ant. The man is like an insect and the landscape reminds us of a man's face. This game, this shifting of levels, which can provoke laughter, I've tried to employ it in the relationship between close-up and landscape, this game of scale, this reversal of importance."

Water flows inward underneath a cottonwood tree

2012-01-27T16:36:00.001Z

In the video clip embedded above the environmental philosopher David Abram talks about the way landscape no longer speaks directly to us. In his book The Spell of the Sensuous, he writes that in oral cultures, ‘human eyes and ears have not yetshifted their synaesthetic participation from theanimate surroundings to the written word. Particular mountains, canyons, streams, boulder-strewn fields, or grovesof trees have not yet lost the expressive potency and dynamism with which theyspontaneously present themselves to the sense. A particular place in the land is never, for an oral culture, just apassive or inert setting for the human events that occur there. It isan active participant in those occurrences.’ These conclusions come after a description of the importance of location for Western Apachestorytelling. An ‘agodzaahi narrative always beginsand ends with a statement explaining where it happened, using one of thelanguage’s evocative place names (which read like compressed poems). Abram cites the work of linguisticanthropologist Keith Basso, who found that these place namesoccur with remarkable frequency in Apache discourse. I was intrigued by this, so I looked up theoriginal Basso article (in CulturalAnthropology, May 1988), where photographs of specificlocations are reproduced to demonstrate how well their Apache place names fit: “Water flows inward underneath a cottonwood tree”; “White rocks lie abovein a compact cluster”; “Water flows down on top of a regular succession of flatrocks.”

According to Basso, ‘the great majority of Western Apache place names currently in use are believed to have beencreated long ago by the “ancestors” (nohwizá’ yé) of the Apache people. The ancestors, who had to travel constantlyin search of food, covered vast amounts of territory and needed to be able toremember and discuss many different locations. This was facilitated by the invention of hundreds of descriptive place names that were intended to depict their referents inclose and exact detail.’ What's particularly interesting about these names (for readers of this blog) is that they assume aspecific point of view, like a landscape: 'Western Apache place namesprovide more than precise depictions of the sites to which the names may beused to refer. In addition, place names implicitly identify positions for viewing theselocations: optimal vantage points, so to speak, from which the sites can beobserved, clearly and unmistakably, just as their names depict them. To picture a site from its name, then,requires that one imagine it as if standing or sitting at a particular spot,and it is to these privileged positions, Apaches say, that the images evoked byplace names cause them to travel in their minds.’ This travel is both “forward” (bidááh) into space, and, following the memory of their ancestors' wanderings, “backward” (t’ aazhi’) into time.

Some wine beside the white clouds

2012-01-21T18:48:00.001Z

Landscape can be a solace to the exile, but it can be hard to contemplate the beauty of lakes and mountains without thinking of home, or the bitter circumstances and long journey that have led from there. When the An Lu-shan rebellion broke out in 756, the poet Li Po travelled south to Kiukiang to escape the turmoil and fighting. There he made an ill-fated decision to join Prince Lin, the Emperor's sixteenth son, whose flotilla was making its way down the Yangtze. Instead of heading off to fight the rebels, Prince Lin was aiming to set up his own independent regime. According to Arthur Waley (in The Poetry and Career of Li Po) it seems unlikely that the rather unworldly Li Po knew what the Prince intended - he would later claim to have been virtually kidnapped: "I allowed myself to be deceived by false pretences and was forced by threats to go on board a transport." At the time though, he wrote poems like 'Watching the dancing-girls at a banquet on board Marshal Wei's transport; written while with the Fleet', indicating that he was thoroughly enjoying himself on this adventure. This pleasant time came to an end near Yangchow, where Prince Lin's forces were met by government troops and his generals abandoned him - Li Po probably jumped ship as well at this point (the prince was captured and executed). On his return to Kiukiang, Li Po was arrested as a traitor and imprisoned for several months. After being set free he made his way to Wu-ch'ang, near Hankow, where he stayed for a while, hoping for a pardon, before continuing again, north, to Yo-chou, near the famous Tung-t'ing (Dong-ting) Lake. There he met two friends, both exiles like himself. Chia Chih was a writer (he had actually composed the Emperor's deed of abdication in 756) and former Governor of Ju-chou who had been demoted after being judged to have fled south from the rebels too hastily. Li Yeh was a relative of Li Po's, banished to the south after being charged with perverting the course of justice. One day, the three friends decided to take an evening boating excursion on the lake...

Hermit Fisherman on Lake Dong-ting, Wu Zhen, 14th century

'The bright moon, the autumn wind / the waters of Lake Dong-ting, / a lone swan, the falling leaves, a tiny skiff.' Thus Chia Chih conveys the beauty and the underlying sadness of the occasion. In his Anthology of Chinese Literature Stephen Owen provides translations of the poems that resulted from this outing. Li Po 'wrote a series of five of his most famous quatrains celebrating the beauty of the moment.' But Chia Chih's are 'every bit as memorable. Both poets called to mind echoes of exile and death beyond the edges of the vast lake, places like Chang-sha, where the Han intellectual Jia Yi was banished.' Li Po imagines riding the currents in the water up into the night sky and buying 'some wine / beside the white clouds.' In the centre of the lake there is a mountain called Jun-shan (the source for one of China's ten famous teas) which Li Po pictures on a 'mirror of jade' - the 'bright lake, swept calm and clear.' Chia Chih describes more turbulent waters, swollen with autumn floods. The friends let the waves guide their light boat, 'no care whether near or far.'

So in eight short poems we have a record of an evening in the autumn of 759, a moment of reflection before events, like waves on the lake, swept these men up again. Climbing Pa-ch'iu Shan that autumn, Li Po glimpsed another fleet mustering and wrote in one of his poems of the rebel forces approaching Lake Tung-t'ing. It was only near the end of the year that peace was restored to the Yangtze region and the poet was finally able to leave, making for Wu-ch'ang where he again expressed his hopes of one day being given a posting back in the capital. But by this time Li Po knew that any such post would be his last. He fell ill while traveling to Nanking and in 762 made his final journey to see the great calligrapher, Li Yang-ping near T'ai-p'ing. Meanwhile Chia Chih had also made his way back and, a year later, on the accession of Emperor Tai-tsung, regained his former position, going on to serve as Vice Minister of War before his death in 772. Li Po seems to have died at the home of Li Yang-ping, to whom the poet entrusted what writings he still had after his years of wandering in exile. According to the well known story, he took another nighttime boat excursion, and this time, drunk on wine, fell into the river and drowned whilst trying to embrace the reflection of the moon.

Note: As always the sources vary in spelling Chinese words and here I've generally stuck to the older Wade-Giles system - for me the poet will always be Li Po rather than Li Bai. The pinyin version of Chia Chih is Jia Zhi. As noted above, Lake Tung-t'ing is now generally called Lake Dong-ting.

Edgelands

2012-01-15T22:40:00.001Z

The Fitzwilliam museum in Cambridge is going to mount a small exhibition later this year, showing prints by two of the artists mentioned in Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts' book Edgelands. 'George Shaw's series, Twelve Short Walks, 2005, is drawn from revisited scenes of his childhood on the Tile Hill council estate in the suburbs of Coventry. Michael Landy's Nourishment, 2002, features life-sized images of weeds, or 'street-flowers' - the overlooked and neglected vegetation of Edgelands.' Shaw's Humbrol-painted views (which made him the favourite to win last year's Turner Prize) and Landy's equally painstaking illustrations of groundsel, toadflax and thale cress represent two different approaches to the edgelands - one an attempt to depict the visual experience of these elusive, marginal spaces, the other an investigation into a particular defining feature: electricity pylons, cooling towers, sheds, containers, litter.

Among the artists who, like George Shaw, convey a sense of the actual landscape, there is David Rayson, who has executed a set of canal path paintings, From Ashmore Park to Wednesfield, where 'there are no people about, just their traces in the old leaden water, the missing railing, the litter...' Then there are the motorway verges that Edward Chell has made the focus for his paintings, even going so far as to exhibit them in Little Chefs. And there are the photographs Keith Arnatt made after leaving behind performance art in the early seventies: Abandoned Landscapes, A.O.N.B., The Forest. In the tradition of Samuel Palmer's detailed jewel-like images, Arnatt has made a series of 'polythene Palmers' - colour images of a rubbish-strewn path, Miss Grace's Lane. But unsurprisingly it is easier to name artists who have chosen to isolate details, like Michael Landy's weeds, than show a wider prospect, since the edgelands tend to fail to live up to even our post-industrial ideas of the picturesque.

Of course some parts of the edgelands have themselves been landscaped, as Farley and Symmons Roberts observe of a new university campus and various retail sites and housing estates. They visit an East Midlands business park where 'shrubs and flowers don't just decorate perimeters, they read like spreadsheets. Thriving businesses have bigger teams of gardeners' and one software company has a lake surrounded by bulrushes. At this point, after a digression on poets and the sub-genre of deer roadkill poems, the authors imagine a wild stag wandering into the business park and ask 'Who would notice? Who would write the poem?' Well, why not one of those software company employees, I wondered. This was one of those moments where the authors seemed to look down on the inhabitants of the landscape rather like eighteenth century tourists (as Robert Macfarlane noted in his review). But aside from that, Edgelands is an engrossing read, scattered with memorable images - like the railway embankment (to pick just one example) which they compare to a glacier, its litter 'caught like till in the ice, inching slowly towards earth with the general tumble of each season's growth.' I also find it impossible not to like a book that references Mark E. Smith's magnificent (and overtly misanthropic) 'Container Drivers'... on which note I'll end this post, playing out with the mighty Fall: '... Look at a car park for two days / Look at a grey port for two days/ Train line, stone and grey/ RO-RO roll on roll off...'

Apocalypse

2012-01-07T14:30:00.000Z

John Martin, The Bard, c1817

As the Tate Britain exhibition John Martin: Apocalypse comes to the end of its run, it would be interesting to know how well it has done. There was talk beforehand of the way that Martin's critical reputation has risen and that his spectacular paintings should appeal in a world of 'proliferating IMAX cinemas and giant plasmas' (Ian Christie in Tate Etc. magazine) and contemporary photography framed on a Sublime scale - Edward Burtynsky, Florian Maier-Aichen, Andreas Gursky (Jonathan Griffin also in Tate Etc.) The Tate's familiar Last Judgement Triptych was accompanied by a new 'theatrical display' intended to evoke the way these paintings were seen around the world in the late nineteenth century. Looking round the exhibition I found it easy to see why John Martin's work has been mocked - "huge, queer and tawdry" was the verdict of William Makepeace Thackeray. Martin's shortcomings are more evident when you see the paintings up close: The Bard for example often gets reproduced in books about Romanticism but I'd not previously been able to see how unconvincing some of its details are - Edward I's army a line of little tin soldiers trailing all the way back to the castle gate. Yet there's still something awesome about these blockbuster paintings (at least that's what the adolescent Chris Foss fan I used to be was telling me) and the exhibition was also fascinating for the way it highlighted Martin's less well known activities - as a decorator of plates, an illustrator of prehistoric creatures (Gideon Mantell's The Wonders of Geology) and a painter of modest topographical water colours, like some views of Richmond Park where, like Edmund Spenser in Ireland, he had an oak tree named after him (how many writers and artists are commemorated in this way I wonder?)

Perhaps the most surprising exhibits were two examples of his schemes to improve the city of London. The first, which might have been drawn by a 1970s land artist or a 1990s psychogeographer, was his plan for a London Connecting Railway - a beautiful curving form superimposed on a map, like the outline of an octopus. The other was a drawing of a sewer housed in a new Thames embankment, stretching from 'the Ranelagh Outlet to the Engine Station': a proposal considered seriously at the time but easy to view as one more facet of Martin's capacity to dream up imaginary cities. (It made me think of today's urban explorers, uncovering tunnels like these and scaling buildings to view the city below from a John Martin perspective.) An excellent article in The Guardian by the John Martin expert William Feaver mentions these engineering projects and claims that Martin 'was ecologically prophetic. In his 1833 A Plan for Improving the Air and Water of the Metropolis he raised an issue such as had been dismissed by the scoffers who ignored divine warnings and were swept away in Noah's flood: "Is it not probable that a too ignorant waste of manure has caused the richest and most fertile countries such as Egypt, Assyria, the Holy Land, the South of Italy etc to become barren as they now are?"'

John Martin, Pandemonium, 1841

The Dawning of Music in Kentucky

2012-01-03T22:52:00.000Z

I recently came upon a nice short essay by Kyle Gann called 'American Romanticism: Music vs. Painting'. It discusses nineteenth century music in relation to the paintings of artists like Frederic Edwin Church and Martin Johnson Heade, mentioning in particular three early orchestral works inspired by landscapes: 'The Ornithological Combat of Kings (1836) by Anthony Philip Heinrich (1781-1861), the Niagara Symphony (1854, though it doesn’t seem to have been performed before the current decade) by William Henry Fry (1813-1864), and Night in the Tropics (1861) by Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869). All three were based on New World subject matter – South or Central America in Heinrich’s and Gottschalk’s cases, like so many of Church’s and Heade’s best paintings. All three offer effects unknown to European music of the time – particularly Gottschalk’s pop-music syncopations and the rumble of eleven timpani with which Fry evokes Niagara’s cascade. All three are marked by a technical ineptitude that any sensitive amateur could pinpoint – Heinrich’s marching-band momentum badly needs a rest now and then, Gottschalk’s harmonic rhythm is deadeningly predictable, and Fry lapses into Wagnerian banality whenever he’s not being onomatapoetically athematic. They seem today like brave but Quixotic figures, would-be heroes whom the passage of time reduces to clowns.'

Frederick Edwin Church, Niagara Falls, 1857

Anthony Philip Heinrich is a particularly interesting figure: a Bohemian wholesale dealer in linen, thread, wine, and other goods who settled in America and only decided to take up music after the failure of his business and death of his wife. According to David Barron, he travelled to Kentucky and in the spring of 1818, where, in a move that anticipates Thoreau, 'he withdrew from the musical society of Lexington, Frankfort, and Louisville and went to live in a log cabin in the woods around Bardstown. This was a significant moment in Heinrich's life, for here he paused to study and instruct himself in the art of music by improvising on the violin, and finally to write down these expressions as vocal, piano, and violin compositions.' His first major publication, a collection of songs and pieces for violin and piano, was called The Dawning of Music in Kentucky or the Pleasures of Harmony in the Solitude of Nature (1820). Like William Henry Fry, he composed a noisy piece inspired by the Niagara Falls, The War of the Elements and the Thundering of Niagara. He was friendly with John James Audubon and in addition to the The Ornithological Combat of Kings mentioned above, composed The Columbiad, or Migration of American Wild Passenger Pigeons. Heinrich's music was performed to acclaim in New York in the 1840s and there were successful concerts back in Prague in 1857, but four years later the old man died in poverty.

John James Audubon, Passenger Pigeon, from Birds of America (1827-38)

The article by David Barron quoted above includes an amusing description of an occasion on which Heinrich was introduced to President Tyler, written by John Hill Hewitt, the piano teacher to Tyler's daughter:

'The composer labored hard to give full effect to his weird production; his bald pate bobbed from side to side, and shone like a bubble on the surface of a calm lake. At times his shoulders would be raised to the line of his ears, and his knees went up to the keyboard, while the perspiration rolled in large drops down his wrinkled cheeks.
The ladies stared at the maniac musician, as they, doubtless, thought him, and the president scratched his head, as if wondering whether wicked spirits were not rioting in the cavern of mysterious sounds and rebelling against the laws of acoustics. The composer labored on, occasionally explaining some incomprehensible passage, representing, as he said, the breaking up of the frozen river Niagara, the thaw of the ice, and the dash of the mighty falls. Peace and plenty were represented by soft strains of pastoral music, while the thunder of our naval war-dogs and the rattle of our army musketry told of our prowess on sea and land.

The inspired composer had got about half-way through his wonderful production when Mr. Tyler restlessly arose from his chair, and placing his hand gently on Heinrich's shoulder, said;
“That may all be very fine, sir, but can't you play us a good old Virginia reel?”'

A Book of Migrations

2011-12-30T15:52:00.001Z

Rebecca Solnit's A Book of Migrations (1997) was reissued this year and classified as history/memoir rather than travel, though it is ostensibly about a month spent in Ireland. The book circles round the themes of landscape and memory, place and identity, journey and exile, as Solnit ranges across the history and culture of Ireland from the flight of the cursed King Sweeney to the bitter experiences of Travellers in contemporary Ireland. The ways in which Ireland has been viewed through the prism of English cultural attitudes are illuminated by the frequent reminders of her own radically different experiences growing up in California, with its arid landscapes and long, straight roads, short historical memory and assumptions about the possibility of an unpeopled wilderness. At the Cliffs of Moher she looks out at the sea, 'a deeper blue than my own churning gray Pacific, blue as though different dreams had been dumped into it, blue as ink. I imagined filling a fountain pen with it and wondered what one would write with that ocean.'

Cover photo by Dave Walsh who reviews the book on his website.

I'll try to convey here just one of the many interesting points she makes on landscape and culture, although I should stress that the elegance of her argument is difficult to convey out of context. In describing the sixteenth century suppression of Ireland by English colonists and its deforestation for shipbuilding and metal smelting, she also talks about the concurrent campaign to suppress the Gaelic poets, whose rhymes in praise of military successes were seen as a kind of propaganda. But 'what is most peculiar about the war against the poets and trees in Tudor era Ireland is the close involvement of the two greatest English poets of the age, Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser.' Furthermore, these were the two writers who practically created the English tradition of pastoral poetry. You might think, she wryly observes, that 'a country of wandering poets and pastoralists should have enchanted the English rather than appalled them.'

Sir Philip Sidney's father was Lord Deputy of Ireland and urged the English to 'spoil' and take the goods of any 'rhymers' they caught. Sidney himself would later go on diplomatic missions to Ireland for Queen Elizabeth. Spenser went over in 1580 as secretary to Sir Henry Sidney's successor Lord Grey and wrote a lengthy report A View on the Present State of Ireland, which recommends subduing the Irish by starving them. He took over an estate in County Cork, formerly the seat of the Desmond family, and 'immediately became unpopular with the neighbours'. It was targeted by rebels in 1598 - Spenser was lucky to escape to England, where he died later that year. Back in 1589, when Sir Walter Raleigh visited him, Spenser's home 'was surrounded with woods of "matchless height"; a few years later only bare fields surrounded the castle.'

The remains of Spenser's Kicolman Castle, County Cork

Photo: Early Modern Whale

For Solnit the shadows of Spenser and Sidney's political lives in Ireland lie across their artistic merit. 'The exquisite poetry of Spenser's masterpiece The Faerie Queene is inextricably linked to his brutal prose A View on the Present State of Ireland ... Should the magical trees he celebrated in the poem be weighed against the trees he uprooted in County Cork? Can one have the latter without the former, since Ireland's lack of a landscape tradition is rooted in its scarred landscape? Can one understand the presence of English literature without the absences of Irish literature? Are the presences in the former, at some level, bites taken out of the latter? Is England gardenlike because Ireland was prisonlike? Does the English pastoral, and the security and abundance it represents, depend on the impoverished land and people of other lands?'

Winter Journey

2011-12-26T08:00:00.000Z

It is ten years since the untimely death of W. G. Sebald and earlier this month there was a special event to celebrate his work and launch Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001. There were contributions from Iain Sinclair, A. S. Byatt, Andrew Motion and others who knew him (like poet Will Stone, whose recollections of studying with Sebald were particularly poignant). It was sad to reflect that the last time I had seen translator Anthea Bell on stage it was next to Sebald himself, reading from the recently-published Austerlitz. The crumbling Victorian Wilton's Music Hall was a particularly resonant setting for the readings, and for the performance of songs from Schubert's Winterreise by Ian Bostridge. Hearing the Winterreise in this context prompted thoughts of all the journeys and sadness in Sebald's writings.

There are many clips online of Ian Bostridge performing the Winterreise - the one I've included above is the opening song in the sequence. I thought it would be interesting to provide here short summaries of the cycle's twenty-four songs, to show how many of them start with some aspect of the winter landscape - the rustling sound of linden trees, ice on a frozen river, a tree's last few leaves trembling in the wind. Many of these natural elements are evoked in Schubert's piano score (for example, in 'Der Lindenbaum', 'the piano’s fluttering triplet figuration in E major which opens the song evokes the gentle breezes and whispering leaves of summer: the figure returns later, altered with chromatic harmonies, to depict the cold wind and eerie rustling of the tree in winter, and the young man’s growing sense of delusion'.) Rather than do a plain synopsis I've turned the Winterreise below into a set of tanka-style verses - I know this is a complete travesty (as Mrs Plinius was quick to point out when she saw what I was doing) but I just found it more fun than writing a set of bullet points... I've based this on the English translation at the Lied, Art Song and Choral Text Archive, using Arthur Rishi's titles; you can follow the link to read proper translations, or the original German poems by Wilhelm Müller.

Good Night

I leave, a stranger -
Remembering the flowers
And the talk of love
As I walk this path in snow
And write “Good Night” on thegate.

The Weathervane

The weathervane blows
Whistling at this fugitive.
In that house, the wind
Plays quietly withpeople’s hearts.
What is my suffering tothem?

Frozen tears

Frozen teardrops fall
Like morning dew turned toice
But spring from a heart
That’s burning hot enoughto
Melt all the ice of winter.

Numbness

No trace of her now
Walking on this once greenfield.
Pale turf, dead flowers.
And if my dead heartshould thaw,
Her image would melt away.

The linden tree

By a fountain, near the gate:
A linden tree. Though it’s dark
I try not to see
The words of love we carvedthere.
Still, I hear the tree rustling.

Torrent

The snow drinks my tears,
But when the grass starts to grow
And the ice breaks up
A brook will carry them through
The town’s streets and past herhouse.

On the stream

Wild stream, with a hard
Solid crust of ice onwhich
I carve her name, and
A broken ring. Underneath
There is a surgingtorrent.

Backward Glance

I’ll not pause until
The town is out of sightwhere
Once the windows shone,
The linden trees wereblooming
And a girl’s eyes wereglowing.

Will-o'-the-wisp

A will-o'-the-wisp
Led me astray. Now I walk
Down a stream’s drycourse.
Every stream will find the sea,
Every sorrow finds its grave.

Rest

Too cold to stand still
I’ve walked this desolateroad.
Sheltering now in
A coal burner’s narrow hut
I cannot rest, my woundsstill burn.

A Dream of Springtime

Dreaming of flowers
And the song of birds inMay,
I wake in the dark
With ravens shriekingabove.
When will all these leavesturn green?

Loneliness

A dark cloud passing
Through clear skies, I make myway
Through bright, joyful life.
When the tempests were raging
I was not so miserable.

The post

What makes my heart leap
At the sound of a posthorn
Coming from the street?
Why would I want to look there?
There is no letter for me.

The grey head

My frost coated hair
Soon thaws and leaves megrieving,
Sad to think that death
Is still far off. This journey
Has still not turned my hair togrey.

The crow

A crow is circling.
It’s been with me since the town
And won’t leave until
The end. Not much further now.
Fidelity to the grave.

Last hope

A few coloured leaves
Are visible on the trees.
If that one I choose
Is caught and blown to the ground
I too will sink down and weep.

In the village

The hounds are barking
Whilst men sleep and dream ofthings
They do not have. Bark
Me away, you waking dogs.
I am finished with all dreams.

The stormy morning

Weary shreds of cloud
Flit across a storm-torn sky,
Red flames among them.
This morning is to my taste -
It is nothing but winter.

Deception

Before me a light…
I follow it eagerly
Through the ice and night
Imagining a warm house…
But it is all delusion.

The signpost

I search hidden paths
Over cliff tops and wastelands -
One sign before me,
My eyes fixed upon the road
From which no one returns

The inn

I reach a graveyard,
Its death wreaths tempting to
The weary traveller.
But all the rooms are taken
And I must go further on.

Courage

Snow flies in my face.
I shake it off. My heart cries,
But I sing brightly.
I have no ears for laments
And stride on against thewind.

The phantom suns

Three suns in the sky –
They seem to stare down atme.
Gone, the best two suns,
And I do not need thethird:
I’m better left indarkness.

The hurdy-gurdy man

Barefoot on the ice,
An old hurdy-gurdy man.
Nobody listens.
Shall I go with him and let
Him play along to my songs?

Landscape in the Trésor des Histoires

2011-12-23T09:48:00.000Z

Landscape in the Trésor des Histoires, Bruges, c. 1475-80

Image from the British Library's Facebook Pages

The British Library's Royal Manuscripts exhibition includes books made from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries but begins with the extraordinary collection of Edward IV, including this copy of a French historical chronicle lying open at 'one of the earliest known European paintings in which landscape is the principal subject.' I've just found that this image also appears in a list of mill images at the Medieval and Renaissance Material Culture site - a good source for other glimpses of landscape in the Middle Ages. What I like about this sort of list is the way it ignores the subject of the picture in favour of an unobtrusive detail - yes, there's an interesting windmill in the illustration below, but you have to drag your eyes away from the gruesome murder to see it (the windmill here nicely balances the clump of trees in a V-shaped composition pointing to the heart of the Roman Emperor). In other images on the site, mills are quietly grinding corn in the background whilst Narcissus looks down at his reflection, King David kneels before God, Elisha raises a woman's son from the dead, Arthurian knights go head to head in a tournament, Priam inspects the reconstruction of Troy, the Romans colonise Latium and ships navigate the coastal waters of Britain.

The assassination of Vitellius in De casibus, first quarter of the 15th century

BNF Fr. 226, fol. 201v, source: larsdatter

Kräuterblätter

2011-12-21T07:00:00.000Z

Writing in The Sunday Telegraph last month, Andrew Graham-Dixon gave a four star review to the British Museum's Landscape, heroes and folktales: German Romantic prints and drawings, an exhibition 'drawn entirely from the holdings of an extremely discerning English private collector, Charles Booth-Clibborn.On this showing, if his collection could be kept together and perhaps, one day, found a permanent home here, it would transform the representation of German art in Great Britain.' A week later Richard Dormer left the exhibition 'fuming', disappointed not to find 'passion, excess, sweeping emotion' and regretting that the display left 'what must be enormous gaps': his review for The Telegraph gave it just two stars. I found it fascinating, even though I only had a brief amount of time to look round, and like Andrew Graham-Dixon I was particularly intrigued by the work of Carl Wilhelm Kolbe (1759-1835).

Carl Wilhelm Kolbe, Woodland pool with a man fishing and bystander, detail, 1793

Kolbe was born in Berlin (his father was a gold thread embroiderer) and pursued a career in philology alongside his artistic activities, composing a long book on the French and German languages. It wasn't until 1789 that he decided to train in art at the Berlin Academy and had to put up with being 'a bearded man in his thirties among a flock of boys, ten to twelve years in age'. He then obtained a post as court engraver in Dessau, publishing prints in Leipzig and Berlin and acquiring the nickname Eichenkolbe (Oak Kolbe) because he was so fond of depicting oak trees (he said 'trees have turned me into an artist'). The exhibition includes several examples of pastoral and woodland scenes with some impressive oak trees My photograph above shows a detail from an early etching with some doodles in the margins (the face in profile is possibly a self-caricature).

I've always thought it would be fascinating to compile a dictionary of the many sub-genres of landscape art - sous-bois for example, the French term for woodland scenes of the kind shown above. Such a book might include micro-genres particular to specific artists and one of the strangest of these would be Kolbe's Kräuterblätter (cabbage-sheets) - scenes featuring over-sized plant life, like his 1801 version of Et in Arcadia Ego. As Andrew Graham-Dixon writes, these etchings 'plunge the eye into vertiginous screens of foliage, spectacularly sculptural blasted trees and writhing, threateningly enlarged clumps of wild vegetation. It is hard to say if these are dreams of oneness with nature or fantasies of being consumed by it.' Kolbe himself came to rather regret these later in life, admitting in his autobiography that he had invented these plants 'completely out of my head, and I acknowledge that I was wrong - very wrong - to do so. Their perhaps not entirely unattractive forms may seduce the eye of the unlearned; the critical gaze of the naturalist cannot bear them.'

Iceberg in Mist

2011-12-20T15:36:00.000Z

Between 1968 and 1970 Gerhard Richter painted a remarkable range of 'damaged landscapes', as they are termed by Mark Godfrey, the curator of Tate Modern's Gerhard Richter: Panorama. These include aerial views of cities in thick grey paint, the colour of ash and rubble, that Richter later likened to images of the destruction of Dresden but which might equally be seen as warnings of some future apocalypse. One of these, Townscape Paris (1968), is a painting I referred to rather tentatively in one of my very first blog posts here. At the same time Richter was also painting a very different kind of townscape, reproducing details of architectural models, and these too seem dystopian - windowless blocks showing no sign of life, casting shadows over empty white roads that resemble the patterns on a circuit board.

Another monochrome aerial view from 1968, Clouds, provides glimpses of an abtsracted version of the German countryside - imagery that Godfrey compares to the opening sequence (above) of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935). Two years later Richter began a very different series of cloud paintings, this time treating them as isolated objects, white against featureless blue-green skies. They resemble Alfred Stieglitz's famous cloud photographs, Equivalents (1927), which in turn (as Rosalind Krauss points out in that weighty tome Art Since 1900) could be viewed as Duchampian readymades - uncomposed and detached from their environment. Alps II (1968) might be a close-up of a storm cloud and is barely recognisable as a landscape painting, certainly a long way from the heroic image of German mountains celebrated in those early Reifenstahl films.

Seascape (Sea-Sea) (1970) is described in the exhibition as a 'collage of two photographs of the sea, one inverted to appear as the sky. The painting creates a momentary illusion of a coherent seascape, until it becomes clear that the ‘clouds’ in the upper half of the painting are waves. It creates a sense of discontinuity and suggests Richter’s acknowledgement of the gulf separating him from the moment of Romanticism.' It made me think of Rothko's grey paintings, with the patterns of waves replacing Rothko's brushtrokes. Mark Godfrey views them as a cross between Capar David Friedrich and Blinky Palermo: an attempt at the kind of radical abstract statement Palermo was making in his Cloth Paintings using the traditional medium of a seascape. Another point of comparison is Vija Celmins and, like her, Richter also produced images of black and white fields of stars.

In 1971 an exhibition of Richter's recent work, painted in flat colour rather than black and white, prompted various critics to compare him with Friedrich. Landscape near Hubbelrath (1969), for example, shows an empty view with a road sign where we expect to see, in Friedrich, a church spire. Richter said that his art lacked the spiritual underpinnings of Romanticism: 'for us, everything is empty'. However, Mark Godfrey argues that Richter and Friedrich both aimed to create a sense of unfulfilled desire (readers of this blog may recall an earlier post on the way Friedrich composed 'obstructed views'). This approach may have seemed particularly appropriate to a post-war German artist working at a time when the purpose of painting itself was being called into question.

There is one more interesting example of Richter's engagement with Friedrich later in the exhibition, a painting called Iceberg in Mist (1982). I have mentioned various artists here before who went north to paint the Arctic seas - Peder Balke, Lawren Harris, Per Kirkeby - and Richter made his own trip in 1972, looking for a motif as powerful as Friedrich's The Sea of Ice. Mark Godfrey mentions that on his return Richter made 'an extraordinary and little-known book of black and white photographs of icebergs', printed, like the two halves of Seascape (Sea-Sea), both upside down and right side up. In this way Richter rejected the single sublime image and arranged the photographs in such a way that 'their overt subject became more or less irrelevant.' Richter's urge to thwart our desire for spectacular landscapes is also evident in the later painting, where we cannot even glimpse the tip of the iceberg as the whole view is shrouded in mist.

Caspar David Friedrich, The Sea of Ice, 1823-4

Frost's Bitter Grip

2011-12-11T21:45:00.000Z

About this time last year, influenced by all those end of year lists, I posted ten examples of landscape musicreleased in 2010, along with accompanying YouTube clips (nine of which still work). Here isa similar list for 2011 and once again it is not supposed to be definitive; I'd certainly be interested in any additional comments and suggestions. I did a post earlier this year on Toshio Hosokawa's Landscapes so am not including that. And, as I have discussed it before, I'm excluding RichardSkelton's Landings, another version of which appeared this year (the expansionof this project reminds me of the way Robert Burton kept adding material to TheAnatomy of Melancholy).

(1) The obvious place tobegin is with Chris Watson, whose El Tren Fantasma, based on recordings ofthe old Mexican ghost train, has been widely praised. Thesoundscape is not restricted to the railway tracks, as you can hear from theSoundCloud extracts below (sections 3 and 5, 'Sierra Tarahumara' and 'Crucero LaJoya'). A BBC review describes the wild countryside throughwhich the train passes: 'brushwood and tall grass sway beneath the breezecrossing canyon slopes, while constant cicada chatter is punctuated by thedistinctive calls of woodpecker and crow.' This was not the only ChrisWatson release this year - Cross-Pollination, also on Touch, includes 'TheBee Symphony', created with Marcus Davidson, and 'Midnight at the Oasis' - recorded out in the Kalahari desert and nothing to do with the 1974 Maria Muldaurhit.

Chris Watson - El Tren Fantasma album preview

(2) WaterBeetles of Pollardstown Fen, was released by Gruenrekordershortly before they announced the premature death of its creator, soundartist Tom Lawrence. This is a very specific take on a landscape; as onereviewer says, 'Pollardstown Fen is an ancient, 500-acre,spring-fed alkali marsh in County Kildare, 30 miles west of Dublin, but tolisten to these hydrophone recordings by Irish musicologist Tom Lawrence, you’dthink it was a well-stocked video arcade circa 1985.' Whilst Chris Watson's ElTren Fantasma was directly inspired by Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète,the sense in which a record like this qualifies as 'music' is quite debatable. Richard Pinnell has writtenthat 'aside from some tastefully simple crossfades there isn’t any editing,enhancements or attempts to sculpt these recordings into anything more than theremarkable audio photographs that they are.'

(3) On adifferent scale entirely, I think it is relevant here to mention Björk's Biophilia,a multi-media project of cosmic ambition based on elements ofnature and the landscape, like the sound of thunder and the cycles of the moon.(I think it would be too much of a stretch to include in this list KateBush and her fifty words for snow...) Björk's live shows have featured new instruments devised for the project - the track 'Solstice' for exampleevokes the rotation of the Earth through the rather beautiful sound of a pendulumharp. The accompanying iPad apps makes me wonderhow far these could be used to develop new genres of landscape art. But despite the involvement of SirDavid Attenborough, no less, these still sound limited: the app for'Crystalline' for example comes with 'a game, in which youcollect crystals in a tunnel as the song plays.' We just stuck to buying theactual album.

Björk's Biophilia app introduced by David Attenborough

(4) Earlier this year I wrote here about J. A. Baker's book The Peregrine but had not then listened to the Lawrence English album inspired by it. Matt Poacher reviewed it for The Liminal and identified the way the music seeks to imitate the movement of the hawk: 'the roar of the surface drones do have the feel of the upper air, and the granular detail becomes like the murmarations of desperate starling or lapwing flocks, banking and swarming in the viciously cold winter wind. ‘Frost’s Bitter Grip’ and ‘Grey Lunar Sea’ also manage to portray, using a mixture of high thin metallic and broader cloud-like drones (not dissimilar in texture to some of the sounds Basinki captures in the warping tape recordings of the Disintegration Loops), the shattering cold of the winter of 1962/3, during which countless birds died and significant parts of Essex’s North Sea coast froze for months on end.'

'December 24 - Frost's Bitter Grip' by Lawrence English

(5) Canadian ambient composer Scott Morgan (who records as Loscil) has named allthe tracks on his new album after features of the Coast Arc Range. Although he uses field recordings the music is mainly built up from slow waves of synthesiser. Appropriately enough it was released by the GlacialMovements label, whose mission statement may sound better in theoriginal Italian but certainly makes clear what they are aiming for in their artists' 'glacial and isolationist ambient' music: "Places that man has forgotten...icy landscapes...fieldsof flowers covered eternally with ice... Icebergs colliding amongstthemselves..The boreal dawn that shines upon silent white valleys in the GreatNorthern lands...an explorer lost among the Antarctic glaciers looking for theway home..."

Loscil - Coast/ Range/ Arc album preview

(6) Guitarist Jon Porras records drones with Evan Caminiti as Barn Owl and has put out solo recordings as Elm. Undercurrent is the first release under his own name and is described as 'California Gothic set to the tidal rhythms of the Pacific and tuned into the metabolic pathways of the northwest coast ... a love poem to the mist, a prayer cast in ghostly reflected guitar and deep pools of distortion'. Opening with 'Grey Dunes' (clip below), the album moves on to tracks with titles like 'Seascape', 'Shore' and ends gently with 'Land's End' and 'Gaze'.

(7)Following last year's round-up, Matt Poacher (whose blog Mountain 7takes a particular interest in landscape and music) left a comment referring me to TheLowland Hundred. I was therefore interested to read hiscomprehensive review this year of Diffaith, a project by The LowlandHundred's Tim Noble. 'East of Aberystwyth is a tract of wild country, windblown and empty.Colloquially it is known as the desert of Wales – not because of a lack ofrainfall but because of this character of emptiness...' Diffaith (Welsh for 'wilderness') comprises sixtracks and three complimentary short films (you can explore it further on Tim Noble's website).According to Matt,the album's centrepiece 'is a vast, monstrous thing, named for the blastedvalley floor of ‘Llawr-y-cwm-bach’. The track is dominated by long periods ofnear-silence, punctuated with huge walls of Stephen O’Malley-like guitar thatthreaten to tear the fabric of the track apart. If Noble’s aim was to make itsound as if the very land were voicing some primeval shriek then he hassucceeded. Christ alone knows what went on down there, but this sounds like ahowl from the void.'

'Llawr-y-cwm-bach' by Tim Noble

(8) Tim Noble , The Lowland Hundred (whose new album Adit has just been released) and Hallock Hill (whose music Matt locates 'at the intersection between landscape and memory') release their records through Hundred Acre Recordings. Another small label whose name would lead you to anticipate music with a landscape theme is Wayside and Woodland Recordings, run by epic45, who been recording pastoral indie pop for some years now and this year released an album called Weathering. Tracks like 'With Our Backs to the City' (below) have reminded reviewers of Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs - 'yet where Mercury Rev seemed to find what they were looking for in the Catskill Mountains, the best epic45 offer is a fleeting glimpse of salvation; the occasional burst of sunlight through a blackened sky.'

(9) It is now five years since I first discussed the Ghost Boxlabel on this blog and excellent new releases continue to appear - this year's highlight was As the Crow Flies, an album by Jon Brooks (The Advisory Circle). Also this year, Jim Musgrave, who works with Ghost Box's Belbury Poly, put out an album as Land Equivalents called Let's Go Orienteering which he describes as 'half-remembered educational films, imagined landscapes, foreboding woodland trails and a last minute dash towards a promised utopia'. This combination sounds very familiar now but there are still more musicians wanting to follow these foreboding woodland trails. The Ley Hunter's Companion by Sub Loam for example is packaged as another piece of aural psychogeography and described as 'two extended synthesiser and sequencer tripsover the summer countryside.'

Sub Loam - Ley Hunter's Companion album preview

(10) As I reach the end of this post I realise it's as much a list of record labels as artists, and the final label I want to mention is Another Timbre. Their recent releases featuring field recording include Tierce, with Jez riley French, and a CDr from Anett Németh ('A Pauper’s Guide to John Cage' and 'Early Morning Melancholia Two') which Richard Pinnell praised highly on his excellent website. But the album I'm highlighting here is Droplets by the trio of Dominic Lash, Patrick Farmer and Sarah Hughes because it includes a performance of Maria Houben's 'Nachtstück' recorded out in the landscape (a wood near Hathersage in Derbyshire to be precise). Dominic Lash says that they didn't anticipate in advance accompanying the sound of a rainstorm: 'The plan was simply to record the piece outdoors; we were hoping for a rain-free window. But when the rains came, some way into the piece, they weren't especially heavy so I decided to keep on playing, hoping it would just be a brief shower. It turned out to be a little bit more than that...'

So we stood, alive in the river of light

2011-12-08T10:00:00.001Z

On Tuesday I attended the dedication of the memorial to Ted Hughes in Poet's Corner. Poems were read by Juliet Stevenson, Seamus Heaney and Daniel Huws (the Welsh writer who knew Hughes at Cambridge); there is a Channel 4 news clip which gives a sense of the atmosphere there. The readings took place in front of Chaucer's tomb, which brought to mind that poem in Birthday Letters where Hughes remembers Sylvia Plath declaiming Chaucer to a field of cows, who seemed enthralled, 'ears angling to catch every inflection.'. Perhaps it would have felt more apt to have heard Hughes's poems out in the landscape, but there in the Abbey, he was connected to a tradition of English poets that began with Cædmon, who found his voice whilst caring for the animals at the monastery of Streonæshalch. Seamus Heaney made a short speech in dedication, invoking the closing lines of Beowolf where a memorial mound, high on a headland is built for the dead hero, 'far-famed and beloved'. The inscription on this new memorial comes from one of the poems in River (1983), 'That Morning', in which Hughes recalled standing solemnly 'in the pollen light / Waist-deep in wild salmon.' It seemed a moment of blessing, as if the fish had let the world as it is pass away: 'there, in a mauve light of drifted lupins, / They hung in the cupped hands of mountains...'

Impressionism 2.0

2011-11-27T14:31:00.000Z

"As my work was often compared to the French Impressionist movement, I decided to follow their traces in Normandy. Filming on the same spots where Monet or Corot used to paint, I will create a kind of Impressionism 2.0" - Jacques Perconte

Impressions / teaser n°1

2011, Normandie : Impressions, 26'
2010, Corse : Après le feu, 7'
2009, Fontainebleau : Annette, 9'
2009, Poitou-Charentes : Le passage, 6'
2008, Médoc : Pauillac, Margaux, 10'
2007, Médoc : Le soleil de Patiras, 3'
2005/7, Landes : uishet, 13'
2003, Périgord Noir : uaoen, 29'

Impressions: Voyage en Normandie is the latest in a series of digitally manipulated landscape films made by Jacques Perconte. The 'actual' view (at least as seen through the camera lens) gradually pixelates and transforms into something more strange. The films enter a kind of 'Impressionist' phase where light patterns and subtle motion in nature are slowed and attended to. But the moving images soon start to resemble Symbolism, Fauvism and eventually Abstract Expressionism - trees turned into jagged patches of colour like a Clyfford Still painting, the horizon flickering like a Barnett Newman zip line. 'We no longer see the image of the landscape, we see the landscape of the image' Perconte says. Violaine Boutet de Monvel has written of a moment in Après le feu, filmed from the back of a train, where a gap appears to open up under the tracks, transforming the real topography. Perconte is interested in this re-imagining of the familiar - as he followed in the footsteps of the Impressionists, he sensed that their landscape was still present, despite the constant movement of clouds and restless activity of the sea. This process tends towards the dissolution of familiar landscape elements into a vision of pure colour. In Perconte's notes on Impressions he quotes Rousseau, losing himself in a reverie and feeling objectes slip away so that he feels nothing but the whole: 'Alors tous les objets particuliers lui échappent; il ne voit et ne sent rien que dans le tout.'

The artist has posted numerous Vimeo clips, photographs, production notes and comments on his own site and his technart blog. I'll end here with a recent film I'll be thinking of on my next train journey: a view of nondescript fields under a grey sky which briefly disappears as the train enters a cutting, only to re-emerge partially smeared away, as if to reveal the software behind this fake landscape of tree forms and wind farms, then progressively changes until we are left with just a few remnants of distorted colour before the screen goes white.

Silence lurks, 2011

A Voyage Round the Coast of Great Britain

2011-11-25T11:40:00.001Z

Three years ago the Folio Society published a new edition of William Daniell's A Voyage Round the Coast of Great Britain. The original book came out in eight volumes between 1814 and 1825, contained 308 hand-coloured aquatints and sold for £60 ('one and a half times what a fisherman or sailor aboard a merchant ship could expect to earn in a year at the time'). A second hand copy of the Folio version (in the excellent Much Ado Books shop) cost me rather less than this. It includes only 114 of the best aquatints and cuts out almost all of the rather dry commentary Daniell wrote, replacing it with extracts from the writings of contemporary travellers. The original intention was for Richard Ayton, an aspiring writer and friend of the family, to accompany Daniell on his travels. But the two of them parted acrimoniously after the first year, having got as far as southern Scotland (the Voyage commenced at Land's End). Daniell pressed on alone, returning to his coastal journey every summer, delayed only by famine in Scotland (1816) and economic crisis and fear of revolution in England (1819). Ayton never did become a successful author and his short life came to a sad end the year Daniell finally completed his great project. The cumulative achievement of the Voyage was recognised by the Royal Academy, who elected Daniell a full member in 1822 - as C. J. Shepherd notes in his introduction, 'the artist that he beat to secure his lifetime's ambition was John Constable'.

Among the texts assembled to accompany Daniell's aquatints in this edition, the most vivid impressions of the coastal landscape are provided by writers like Keats, Southey, Scott and Dorothy Wordsworth (whose travels in Scotland I have discussed here before). But the book encompasses many other interesting voices - Joanna Schopenhauer at Lancaster, Jane Austen at Lyme, the 'exquisitely fashionable' Hermann von Pückler-Muskau in Brighton, James Johnson, author of 'An Essay on Indigestion; or Morbid Sensibility of the Stomach and Bowels', in Liverpool, a gentleman called Charles Cochrane who for some reason went to Margate disguised as an itinerant Spanish gypsy guitarist, the ornithologist Charles Fothergill who visited Flamborough Head 'resplendent in 'white and green hat; a Belcher neckcloth with my short collar appearing over it; a dark green jacket with silver buttons; [and] sky blue pantaloons'', composer Felix Mendelssohn, who sent home a few bars of music which would become the Hebridean Overture, and the 'excitable young Polish tutor and future revolutionary' Krystyn Lach-Szyrma, who was so overwhelmed by Fingal's Cave, a 'glorious cathedral made by nature's hand', that he threw himself into the sea.

Cover by David Eccles,

after William Daniell's In Fingal's Cave, Staffa

In his Preface to A Voyage Round the Coast of Great Britain, Robert Macfarlane writes that seeing Daniell's aquatints leads us to imagine Britain only by its outline. 'The interior falls away, and all that is left is the frame. And what a frame it is! Some 7,500 miles of coastline, forming a continuum from storm-crashed headlands to beach-front amusements, from salt-marsh to heathland, from 400-million-year-old gneiss to endlessly recast mudflats.' With this in mind it is clearly impossible to pick out a typical view - the two shown below I liked for the non-naturalistic regularity of their rock formations and the precisely distributed seabirds and grazing sheep. Yet despite their variety all of Daniell's aquatints have the same harmonious, muted palette of slate blue, grey green and pale browns. He may, as Macfarlane says, portray all kinds of meteorological conditions - 'a doldrummish sea day in Ilfracombe, sails drooping in the heat, gives way to a Force 7 off Holyhead' - but the weather somehow always looks British.

Near view of one of the Shiant Isles

Needles Cliff and Needles, Isle of White

William Daniell's journeys coincided with the rise of picturesque tourism and bathing resorts, the Napoleonic Wars, the Highland Clearances and the rapid development of industry and infrastructure. Robert Southey, for example, toured the Highlands with Thomas Telford, whom he nicknamed Pontifex Maximus, the great bridge builder. In one of this book's extracts from Southey's Journal of a Tour in Scotland in 1819, the conversion of the Marquess of Stafford's estate's into extensive sheep-farms is criticised: 'a quiet, thoughtful, contented, religious people' forcefully transplanted from the glens to the sea coast. At the other end of Britain, Dover had recently been scarred by vast new fortifications to keep out the French, a fact that William Cobbett found perplexing - 'what the devil should they come to this hill for, then?' He concluded bitterly that 'more brick and stone have been buried in this hill than would go to build a neat new cottage for every labouring man in the counties of Kent and of Sussex!' Shakespeare's Cliff (which I have written about here before) was also visited by artist Benjamin Robert Hayden who stood looking at it, 'almost lost in the embruno tint of twilight'. There he imagined 'a Colossal Statue of Britannia' built on top of it, 'surveying France with a lofty air.'

I could go on, but I'll end this post at Lulworth Cove, where Daniell painted the rocky outcrop of Stair Hole with its striking recumbent folds. The book includes an extract from the recollections of the Irish playwright John O'Keeffe who spent a summer at Lulworth with his children. As soon as he arrived, O'Keeffe set off with his son, called Tottenham, to explore the Cove itself and the craggy rocks above. At the end of the day 'we returned to our abode with appetites sea-sharpened, and sat down to a roast loin of lamb, delicate boiled chickens, tongue, green-peas, young potatoes, a gooseberry pie, thick cream, good strong home-brewed ale and a glass of tolerable port-wine.' Next morning they were off again, climbing Hanbury Hill where O'Keeffe recorded two of the local landscape terms - patches of land called 'knaps, larger or smaller, each divided from the other by a grassy rising, termed a launchet.' Tired from the climb, he and Tottenham sat down to look at the view - 'before us, the great expanse; above, the blue serene; around, the melody of birds; scarce a breath from the still bosom of the deep, and the vertical sun shedding his glories on the scene. Neither the scream of sea-gulls, crows, and puffins, could prevent me falling into a slumber, and, in a sort of sweet demi-dream, I could hear the rushing pinions of birds that must have flown by very near me, and felt the rabbits that I fancied ran over me.'

The kill of New York is a brook in New England

2011-11-19T09:00:00.001Z

BRANCH – RUN – FORK – BROOK – KILL – STREAM – BAYOU – SWAMP – SLOUGH – WASH – CAÑADA – ARROYO - RIO

I came across Derek Watkins' excellent map, showing the distribution across America of different toponyms for 'river', on the Spatial Analysis blog (where James Cheshire has added his own UK version). It reminded me that I have been meaning for some time to do a post here about Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney and compiled by a team of writers between 2002 and 2006. Robert Macfarlane described this book in a wonderful essay published last year ('A Counter-Desecration Phrasebook'): 'Its ambition was to retrieve, define and organise nearly 1,000 terms and words for specific spects of landscape. Its ethical presumption was that having a language for natural places is vital for two reasons: because it allows us to speak clearly about such places, and because it allows us to fall into the kind of intimacy with such places which might also go by the name of love or enchantment, and out of which might arise care and good sense.'

So what does Home Ground have to say about these river terms? For the first one, BRANCH, the reader is referred to FORK and the entry, written by Bill McKibben, describes some of the geographical variation evident in Derek Watkins' map. Easterners are likely to call forks branches, tributory is used elsewhere, 'and those in west Texas would call smaller forks prongs.' His example of a 'prong' is the North Prong of the Little Red River Fork in Briscoe County Texas. RUN, according to Kim Barnes, always denotes movement and 'can refer to any small stream, brook, creek, rivulet, channel, overflow, or swiftly flowing watercourse.' Early Virginian settlers, naming the landscape, came to think in terms of a hierarchy by size: rivers > creeks > runs. BROOK needs no explanation, but KILL? It is the Dutch word for brook and appears in the name of landforms of the Hudson and Deleware Valleys, most famously the Catskill Mountains. The term is not seen in the lower Hudson Valley, probably because, as Jan DeBlieu explains in Home Ground, the Dutch colony was subsumed into the surrounding English speaking culture after the capture of New Netherland in 1644.

Often the authors of Home Ground include illustrative quotations from American literature, like the 'dark stream shooting along its dismal channel' in Melville's Typee. Gretel Ehrlich's entry on STREAM describes it as a dynamic force that 'receives, and thus reflects, the abuses that have taken place on the land.' The next few terms, BAYOU, SWAMP and SLOUGH, sound aything but dynamic. 'The bayous are spaces of open water, sluggish or stagnant' and a slough 'is a narrow stretch of sluggish water in a river channel'. The city of Chicago is built on filled sloughs. The word bayou is derived from the Choctaw word for a small stream, bayuk. Okefenokee Swamp gets its name from a Creek Indian word meaning 'Land of the Trembling Earth'. A Harry Crews quote explains why: 'most islands in the swamp - some of them holding hundreds of huge trees growing so thick that their roots are matted and woven as closely as a blanket - actually float on the water; and when a black bear crashes across one of them, the whole thing trembles.'

With the word WASH we move into the American Southwest : Carrizo Wash in Arizona, Hunter's Wash in New Mexico. These are areas of land over which 'subtle contours allow water to flow, or "wash", from elevated to lower zones.' ARROYO can be used to describe the same general feature, or, more specifically, a steep-walled, flat-bottomed creek. Either way it is ephemeral, 'carrying water only briefly during such events as spring runoff or the summer monsoons.' Two more Spanish terms complete the map: RIO and CAÑADA, 'a wetland rich with river reeds'. The words RIVER and CREEK are also included but, are so common that they have been coloured grey. Here in Britain, a creek is a saltwater inlet or the estuary of a stream. In the entry for 'creek' in Home Ground, novelist Charles Frazier explains that the term spread to mean any flow smaller than a river. 'In a few places, though, a distinction was retained. M. Schele DeVere, in his 1872 Americanisms: The English of the New World, put it succinctly: "The kill of New York is a brook in New England, a run in Virginia and alas! a crick or creek, almost everywhere else."'

Walter Benjamin's Grave

2011-11-13T12:45:00.001Z

'The cemetery faces a small bay directly looking over the Mediterranean; it is carved in stone in terraces; the coffins are also pushed into such stone walls. It is by far one of the most fantastic and most beautiful spots I have ever seen in my life.'

- Hannah Arendt, letter to Gershom Scholem, 21 October 1940

Michael Taussig's essay, 'Walter Benjamin's Grave: A Profane Illumination', describes the cemetery of Portbou, the small town on the border of France and Spain where Benjamin died in 1940. Carrying his possessions in a heavy black briefcase, Benjamin was led there over the mountains by a young woman, Lisa Fittko. 'It was the first time she had made the trip. Benjamin was her first refugee ... She got lost. They backtracked. Then they found their way to the summit: "The spectacular scene appeared so unexpectedly that for a moment I thought I was seeing a mirage ... the Vermillion Coast, an autumnal landscape with innumerable hues of reds and yellow-gold. I gasped for breath - I had never seen such beauty before."' But the the Franco government had cancelled all transit visas and on the night of September 25th Walter Benjamin, fearing repatriation, took an overdose of morphine tablets. Hannah Arendt, then still in the South of France, came to look for his grave soon afterwards. Lisa Fittko and her husband Hans continued the dangerous work of escorting refugees across the border. Hans took to wearing a Basque cap and sandals to blend in with the locals. Sometime he would sit for hours on a cliff projection looking out to sea.

Dani Karavan, Walter Benjamin Memorial at Portbou, 1994

The beauty of this place, which so struck Hannah Arendt and Lisa Fittko, seems at variance with its history of displacement and disappearance. Michael Taussig first visited Portbou in 1987 and found the whole town a sad monument to Benjamin's death - 'cold, nasty, and enigmatic.' But now, on returning fifteen years later, he comes upon the new monument to Walter Benjamin, designed by Dani Karavan, an artist from Tel Aviv. An iron triangle forms a doorway leading to steps that take you down the slope of the hill towards the sea. At the bottom there is a thick pane of glass inscribed with Benjamin's words: 'It is more arduous to honour the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the nameless.' The words could be taken to refer as much to the victims of Franco as to the Nazis. Looking back up the stairs, the doorway frames a rectangle of blue sky, echoing the view of the breaking waves below.

Later, inside the cemetery itself, Taussig is struck by a virtually identical set of steps, leading from the graves to the chapel. He recalls Benjamin's surrealist conception of the 'profane illumination', where something provides a new kind of experience whilst retaining the trace of the kind of religious illumination it has surpassed. In the cemetery at Portbou there are niches bearing the names of the dead and a common grave, the fosa común, in which Benjamin's remains may actually lie. The monument, by contrast, is a profane illumination, which 'gathers its strength through the open expression of namelessness as empty space, sea and sky. It truly is an emphatic statement on the weighting of the world by its nameless dead.' Standing on the headland Taussig feels the full force of the transmontaña wind. 'Can we imagine a state, a religion, or a community bound to remembrance which would have thye courage or craziness to call a wind a monument?' Walter Benjamin once wrote that the best way to light a cigarette is with a flintstone and fuse. 'The wind blows the matches out, but the harder the wind blows, the more the fuse glows.'

Ice Music

2011-11-09T22:53:00.003Z

Terje Isungset, the Norwegian percussionist renowned for his ice horns, is here in Britain again. We went to see him last night at LSO St. Lukes in a concert that began with the solo percussion piece called Tribute to Nature. This was played on his special drum kit, featuring sheepbells strung up with rope, a ride cymbal on a weathered stick, bundles of clave-like arctic birch sticks and pieces of granite. It started quietly with the tapping of sticks and the scraping of stones, grew louder and more expressive with horns and Jew's harp, and ended with a long sigh of breath. He then left the stage to be replaced by the LSO's Wind Ensemble, who performed Carl Nielsen's Wind Quintet (1922). A film collaboration between Isungset and Phil Slocombe, 'The Idea of North', was supposed to be played at the interval but never materialised - instead we waited expectantly for the appearance of the ice instruments. Eventually they emerged - two white blocks carried onto stands and adjusted by a sculptor-roadie, wrapped up in a parka and woolly hat. The ice had been driven here from Norway; the first clip below shows Terje Isungset carving his instruments directly from the frozen landscape.

Ice Music, the second part of last night's concert, featured Isungset's regular singing partner Lena Nymark (you can see them on stage together towards the end of the second clip above). She is evidently pregnant, prompting my wife to speculate on the benign influence this music was having on the unborn child. Isungset began by crunching and tapping one of the ice blocks before moving on to an ice xylophone which he played with ice sticks and bare hands (as he says in the clip below, ice has a surprisingly warm sound when tapped with the finger). The ice horns only came out for a short time - but since they melt whilst being played this was not too surprising. At the end of the concert I went up to the stage and held a shard of ice lying on the floor, wondering if this had come from the 600 year old Jostedalbreen glacier. Terje Isungset has said that the instruments he makes are eventually returned 'back to nature where they belong.'

After the concert - ice remnants

Gausta Peak

2011-11-06T13:24:00.000Z

I mentioned Peder Balke in connection with the National Gallery's 'Forests, Rocks, Torrents' exhibition but thought I would add another post because he is an interesting example of that not uncommon phenomenon, the rediscovered landscape artist. Christopher Riopelle says in the catalogue that Balke is only emerging now 'in international eyes as a master of Norwegian landscape, the subject of exhibitions, scholarly publications and bidding wars in auction rooms.' The National Gallery recently bought a small seascape The Tempest - the first Balke painting to enter a British public collection. Riopelle compares Balke to August Strindberg, whose landscape painting (see my earlier post) has also only come to prominence in recent decades. 'Like Strindberg, Balke was blithely convinced his work sat squarely in the mainstream,' whilst for us the paintings look more like forerunners of expressionism. From the 1860s Balke gave up trying to make his living as a painter and turned instead to real estate (a sad fate for a landscape painter, one might think). When he died in 1884 his art was forgotten, but in his spare time Balke had continued to produce experimental landscape paintings, drawing on the memories of his travels, and 'small black and white improvisations' like The Tempest.

Peder Balke, Gausta Peak, 1877

Another Nordic artist I've discussed here before, Per Kirkeby, wrote a book about Peder Balke in 1996 which in turn inspired a joint exhibition two years ago. I have not had the opportunity to read this book but the website for Norwegian artist Espen Dietrichson includes a description. 'Kirkeby writes that, by looking at artists such as Balke, Turner and Delacroix, we can discover an alternative historical realism. This depends on identifying a range of painters’ ‘dirty tricks’, such as how texture can be used to create calculated, dramatic effects, and how experimentation with new perspectives can change perception. Kirkeby maintains that the pervading art historical distinction between pure abstraction and less honourable effects has traumatised art in relation to its history. This is why he finds it so important to solve the enigma of Peder Balke and to thereby understand why the elevated and sublime can only be achieved through the ‘dirtiest of means’. For example, Balke’s outsider position as a small-town painter-decorator [i.e. his early background, before training as an artist] allowed him to eschew the codified illusionism of (Norwegian) national romanticism, and hence to make use of techniques that differed radically from those of his contemporaries – marbling, or the use of sponges or combs on wet paint – which would have seemed a profanation of academic dogmas.'

The waving moorland and the level beach

2011-11-04T10:54:00.000Z

I have been listening to the audiobook of The Woman in White, read by Ian Holm (whose voice always takes me back to childhood memories of the Radio 4 adaptation of Lord of the Rings). The novel begins with the narration of a drawing master, who is distracted from the landscape by the beauty of one of the young ladies he is supposed to be teaching. 'The most trifling of the questions that she put to me, on the subject of using her pencil and mixing her colours; the slightest alterations of expression in the lovely eyes that looked into mine with such an earnest desire to learn all that I could teach, and to discover all that I could show, attracted more of my attention than the finest view we passed through, or the grandest changes of light and shade, as they flowed into each other over the waving moorland and the level beach.' There follows an interesting passage on Art and Nature which I thought I would quote here in full. You could contrast the closing sentences with the way other writers have taken comfort in the thought that it is the landscape that will outlast humanity (see, for example, my earlier post on Robinson Jeffers).

'At any time, and under any circumstances of human interest, is it not strange to see how little real hold the objects of the natural world amid which we live can gain on our hearts and minds? We go to Nature for comfort in trouble, and sympathy in joy, only in books. Admiration of those beauties of the inanimate world, which modern poetry so largely and so eloquently describes, is not, even in the best of us, one of the original instincts of our nature. As children, we none of us possess it. No uninstructed man or woman possesses it. Those whose lives are most exclusively passed amid the ever-changing wonders of sea and land are also those who are most universally insensible to every aspect of Nature not directly associated with the human interest of their calling. Our capacity of appreciating the beauties of the earth we live on is, in truth, one of the civilised accomplishments which we all learn as an Art; and, more, that very capacity is rarely practised by any of us except when our minds are most indolent and most unoccupied. How much share have the attractions of Nature ever had in the pleasurable or painful interests and emotions of ourselves or our friends? What space do they ever occupy in the thousand little narratives of personal experience which pass every day by word of mouth from one of us to the other? All that our minds can compass, all that our hearts can learn, can be accomplished with equal certainty, equal profit, and equal satisfaction to ourselves, in the poorest as in the richest prospect that the face of the earth can show. There is surely a reason for this want of inborn sympathy between the creature and the creation around it, a reason which may perhaps be found in the widely-differing destinies of man and his earthly sphere. The grandest mountain prospect that the eye can range over is appointed to annihilation. The smallest human interest that the pure heart can feel is appointed to immortality.'

- Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, 1860

William Collins, the father of Wilkie Collins,

Children on a Mountain Top, before 1847

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Landscape with Ascanius shooting the Stag of Sylvia

2011-10-28T11:04:00.000+01:00

The Ashmolean Museum's exhibition Claude: The Enchanted Landscape, which I looked round yesterday, provides a good opportunity to compare the artist's drawings and sketches. A preparatory sketch for Claude's last painting, Ascanius shooting the Stag of Sylvia, shows the foreground figures standing out from their background and Ascanius (the son of Aeneas) just left of centre. Trees, portico and people are all on a more realistic, less monumental scale. In the painting, as Martin Sonnabend and Jon Whiteley point out in the catalogue, 'everything has been suffused with an air of fantasy. The hunters are impossibly elongated - Ascanius, in particular, is absurdly top-heavy - but even they are overwhelmed by the landscape, lit by a silvery sky, which arches over them and recedes far back into the blue, snow-capped hills.'

Claude Lorrain, Ascanius shooting the Stag of Sylvia, 1682

Source: Wikimedia Commons

I was curious to compare the two figures of Ascanius directly and so had a play on Photoshop, as you can see below. It would seem facile to say this shows Claude could have painted more naturalistic figures if he'd wanted to, but the point is worthwhile because contemporaries criticised this aspect of his painting and Claude himself reportedly joked that when he sold his landscapes he threw the figures in for nothing. Of course the figures in Ascanius shooting the Stag of Sylvia can't be seen in isolation (or cut out from their setting); the painting's harmonius colours and soaring forms combine to convey a legendary time and place, dreamed from the poetry of Virgil. Goethe summed up the nature of landscapes like this in 1829, when he said that Claude's paintings 'possess the highest truth, but no trace of reality.'

The Valley of the Ladies

2011-10-26T22:19:00.000+01:00

"Do not hold back," I cried, "I beg you, by Zeus and by Eros himself! It will give me all the more pleasure if your tale is indeed like fiction."
And with these words, I took him by the hand and led him to a neighbouring grove, where the plane trees grew thick and plentiful, and the water flowed by cool and clear, just as it comes from freshly melted snow. I sat him down there on a low bench, and sat myself next to him.
"Well, it is time to hear your story," I said, "A setting such as this is delightful, and just right for erotic fiction."

- Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon, Book 1, 2nd century CE (trans. Tim Whitworth)

What is the best kind of landscape in which to listen to a story? I suppose it may vary according to genre, as Achilles Tatius implies, but a grove like the one Clitophon is led to, a locus amoenus of comfort, privacy and natural beauty, would seem ideal. Here landscape is a gentle backdrop, not a distraction or a subject for discourse itself. In Plato's Phaedrus Socrates is taken to a similar location, but makes a point of reminding Phaedrus as they walk there: 'I am a lover of knowledge, and the men who dwell in the city are my teachers, and not the trees or the country.' He is nevertheless very pleased with the quiet location they find by the cooling water of the Ilissus, 'full of summer sounds andscents. Here is this lofty and spreading plane-tree, and the agnuscastus high and clustering, in the fullest blossom and the greatestfragrance; and the stream which flows beneath the plane-tree isdeliciously cold to the feet. Judging from the ornaments and images,this must be a spot sacred to Achelous and the Nymphs. How delightful isthe breeze:--so very sweet; and there is a sound in the air shrill andsummerlike which makes answer to the chorus of the cicadae. But thegreatest charm of all is the grass, like a pillow gently sloping to thehead. My dear Phaedrus, you have been an admirable guide.'

John William Waterhouse, A Tale from the Decameron, 1916

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The history of literature is full of frame stories but the most famous to be set in a locus amoenus is surely The Decameron. In fact Boccaccio's ten young Florentines find refuge from the plague in three such locations: two gardens, described on the first and third days, and then a garden-like landscape, The Valley of the Ladies, which they explore on the sixth. Despite being outside the protecting walls of country villa, this valley has the essential element of seclusion - the only means of entry is a narrow path, beside which flows a clear stream. The valley floor is so circular it seems to have been drawn with compasses, 'though it seemed the work of nature', and the valley's sides are terraced like a natural amphitheatre. Vines and fruit trees grow on the south side, thick trees on the north. The stream feeds a tiny lake so transparent that you can count the stones in it. On discovering it the ladies are unable to resist a swim, the water concealing 'their chaste white bodies no better than a thin sheet of glass would conceal a pink rose.' You can well imagine one of them echoing the words of Achilles Tatius, "a setting such as this is delightful, and just right for erotic fiction." And it is on a grassy spot by this lake that they resume their storytelling the following day.

Two Years at Sea

2011-10-23T16:32:00.000+01:00

Ben Rivers' first feature film Two Years at Sea (2011) follows the solitary life of Jake Williams in his ramshackle house in the woods of Aberdeenshire. It has a wonderful landscape sequence where Jake floats slowly across the frame on a home-made raft. The film was shot using reclaimed 16mm Bolex cameras on Kodak Plus-X (which, if I remember rightly, was what Grant Gee used in Patience: After Sebald) and processed in the film-maker's own kitchen. This film stock seems to add extra layers of fog to the low hills and fir trees. Watching it on Friday, I was conscious at one point that I was seeing a view successively filtered through faling rain, a car windscreen, an old camera lens being shaken around as Jake drove up a track, and the grainy black and white film itself, hand-processed and then re-projected onto the cinema screen. The Q&A session after this London Film Festival screening revealed the extent to which the film constructs its own version of the real Jake. Jake himself was there answering questions, dispelling some of the films' mysteries and revealing the extent to which it was a collaboration: the raft idea, for example, had been a long-standing idea of Jake's but it was the presence of the camera that prompted him to construct it and paddle out onto that grey, misty lake.

Image from David Bordwell's site.

The Jack Pine

2011-10-21T16:18:00.000+01:00

Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven is another superb exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery, following others I've described on this blog: Salvator Rosa, Paul Nash, Adam Elsheimer. Reviewers (like Brian Sewell) will inevitably have to provide some background information on the Group of Seven, whose work has not often been seen in the UK. In Canada, as Ian A. C. Dejardin says in the catalogue, their work has been endlessly discussed 'to the point of exhaustion. Yet their visual legacy remains supremely powerful: many Canadians, raised with reproductions of the Group of Seven's most famous paintings on their classroom walls, still see their own country through the Group's eyes ... Few of us in Europe could point more than vaguely on a map to any of the locations these artists depicted. These are painted woods, trees, lakes and mountains only. Nonetheless, non-Canadians should be aware: we are on holy ground.' As I know some readers of this blog are Canadian (see comments on my last post...) I'd better admit that a lot of these paintings were completely new to me.

Tom Thomson in Algonquin Provincial Park, 1914-16

Source (all images here): Wikimedia Commons

At the start of the exhibition, there is a quotation from Fred Housser, who wrote the first book about the Group of Seven in 1926: "This task [of expressing the spirit of the Canadian landscape in paint] demands a new type of artist; one who divests himself of the velvet coat and flowing tie of his caste, puts on the outfit of the bushwacker and prospector; closes with his environment; paddles, portages and makes camp; sleeps in the out-of-doors under the stars; climbs mountains with his sketch box on his back." The idea of an artist who 'closes with the environment' reminds me of recent British land artists who have walked in Algonquin Park and other landscapes explored by the Group of Seven.

When Tom Thomson died in 1917, his memorial described him as 'artist woodsman and guide'. Photographs show him fishing and canoeing; one of these was the basis for Peter Doig's White Canoe (1992) (see also my earlier post on Doig's Figure in a Mountain Landscape paintings). However, as Dejardin points out in the catalogue, Thomson was actually rather a snappy dresser when out and about in Toronto and he made a point of adding some expensive cobalt blue to the marine grey used in painting his canoe. In 1919 the wealthiest of the group, Lawren Harris, had a boxcar fitted out as a travelling studio for a trip north on the Algoma Central Railway. It sounds more comfortable than the floating studios of the Impressionists, but this didn't detain some of the artists: as A. Y. Jackson observed, sitting in the boxcar, 'the other chaps are all out sketching under umbrellas. They are all trying to turn out four a day and can't stop if it rains.'

Tom Thomson, The Jack Pine, 1916

Tom Thomson's most famous paintings, The Jack Pine and The West Wind, are shown alongside their original sketches in the exhibition's first room. Each is a majestic landscape visible behind the drooping form of a pine tree, its branches seemingly surrounded by a faint aura. Pine trees seem to have inspired poets and artists all over the world so it seems surprising in retrospect that (according to Housser) the Canadian artistic establishment, unable to see beyond European and Hudson River landscape visions, considered their native Jack Pine trees unpaintable before Thomson came along. There is a Pine Island in Georgian Bay (part of Lake Huron) and this exhibition includes two 1914 sketches of it by Thomson and a night scene by Jackson, where the trees stand over a pool of deep blue in which you can see the reflections of stars.

Six of the Group of Seven, plus their friend Barker Fairley, in 1920

From left to right: Frederick Varley, A. Y. Jackson, Lawren Harris,

Fairley, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, and J. E. H. MacDonald.

In 1925 a critic noted that the Group had been 'tree mad', but also, successively, 'lake-lunatic, river-ridden, birch-bedlamed, aspen addled, and rock-cracked. This year they are mountain mad.' The exhibition's room of mountain views includes Frederick Varley's Hodleresque The Cloud, Red Mountain (1927-8) and Lawren Harris's stylised, almost art deco Mt Lefroy (1930), although I preferred the more direct, less abstract approach of J. E. H. MacDonald, especially a view of a small turquoise lake in the gathering snow with the Japanese-sounding title, Mountain Solitude (Lake Oesa) (1932). The final room collects more of Harris's Theosophically-inspired landscapes from the late twenties - radically simplified mountains and ice bergs under grey skies, sometimes parted with shafts of light, reflecting his search for those 'moments in the North when the outward aspect of nature becomes for a while full luminous to her informing spirit - and man, nature and spirit are one.'

Cloud and light

2011-10-16T22:11:00.001+01:00

Toshio Hosokawa's new opera Matsukaze, based on a Noh play by Zeami, has received a lot of praise this year. The New York Times review explains that it begins with some field recordings: 'the tranquil sound of waves washing up on a beach, which he recorded off the coast near Tokyo in January. Two months later, when the cast assembled in Berlin to begin preparing for the opera’s premiere in Brussels, the waves had acquired an entirely different significance. “We heard those water and wind sounds, and we remembered at once the tsunami...”'

Last month ECM issued a new set of Hosokawa recordings, Landscapes. Despite the title this only includes one of his early 90s 'Landscape' chamber pieces (some of which are currently viewable on Youtube - see below). It features a new expanded version of 'Landscape V' for shô and string orchestra; the other tracks are 'Sakura für Otto Tomek', 'Cloud and Light', and 'Ceremonial Dance'. The Independent's Andy Gill pronounces the album 'exquisite' but The Guardian's Andrew Clements thinks it 'exquisite in a self-conscious way ... for a few minutes the effect is entrancing, but after that it begins to pall'. In his liner notes Paul Griffiths says 'The interplay of shô and strings, and in particular their mutual imitation, is the driving force – or perhaps one should say ‘drifting force’, given that the music carries itself so lightly ... its effect is of observing clouds in a largely peaceful sky, clouds that are mostly white but occasionally show shadows and briefly stir into more turbulent action.”

Daphnis and Chloe

2011-10-15T20:56:00.001+01:00

There is a delightful sense of freedom in the lives of Daphnis and Chloe, as the young goatherd and shepherdess grow to love each other in the woods and fields of Lesbos. Daphnis (Δάφνις) is named after the laurel bush and Chloe (χλόη) means the fresh green grass of spring. They herd their animals together, share their food and milk and wine; Chloe picks stems of asphodel to make little cages for grasshoppers, Daphnis binds together slender reeds and learns to play the pan pipes. In the summer they listen to the singing of rivers, the wind in the pines and the sound of the cicadas. Two places in particular are special to them: a statue of Pan underneath a pine tree and, nearby, a cave dedicated to the Nymphs, from which a spring rises whose stream nourishes a meadow of soft grass. There is some hard work - for Chloe the wearisome job of churning milk - but after it is done the lovers have time to bathe, pick fruit and lie together kissing under an oak tree.

Léon Samoilovitch Bakst, set design for Ravel's Daphnis et Chloë, 1912

Source: Wikimedia Commons

As you read about the passing of the seasons and the growing love of Daphnis and Chloe, it is easy to forget that the landscape Longus is describing is actually made up of the estates of rich men, living away in the city, and that Daphnis and Chloe are actually slaves. Daphnis works on 'a very splendid property: it had mountains abounding in game, plains fertile in wheat, gentle slopes with vineyards, pastures with flocks, and a long stretch of shore where the sea broke on the softest sand.' The last part of the novel, Book 4, begins with the news that the Master is returning to look over his property, including a large pleasure ground, containing cypresses, laurels, pines, and plane trees, fruit trees (apple, pear, pomegranate), beds of roses, lilies and hyacinths, and wild flowers: violets, narcissi, pimpernels. In a description which reads like a blueprint for eighteenth century landowners, Longus writes that 'from there, a wide prospect opened over the plain and the sea beyond, and it was possible to see the peasants minding their flocks and herds, and the ships scudding across the bay - that view was another of the delights afforded by the pleasure-ground' (trans. Ronald McCall).

In the end, it turns out (to no great surprise) that Daphnis and Chloe are not the children of peasants - both had been exposed at birth by their real parents, suckled by a goat and a sheep, discovered and then brought up in the countryside. But after they marry they return to their rustic idyll and own sheep and goats in great number. They name their children Philopoeman ('friend to shepherds') and Agele ('herd'). It is a happy ending but to a modern reader it seems a shame that they go on to 'beautify' the Nymphs' cave with pictures and 'let Pan have a temple for his home instead of the pine tree'. Such artifice is of course in keeping with the pastoral genre and indeed the entire novel is a kind of ekphrasis: its preface explains that Daphnis and Chloe is a story the author saw one day while he was out hunting in Lesbos, depicted in a painting, hanging in a grove sacred to the Nymphs.

Titian, The Three Ages of Man, c1512

It has been suggested that this may show scenes from Daphnis and Chloe

Source: Wikimedia Commons

There are other things I could say about landscape in relation to this book, but I'll confine myself to noting that there are three points in the story where aetiological myths are poetically retold to explain natural phenomena: the call of the wood pigeon, the origin of pan-pipes and the source of echoes. Chloe first experiences an echo while listening with Daphnis to the singing from a passing boat, down below them in a deeply curving bay. Behind the level pasture where they stand there is a hollow coomb which receives the sounds and 'like a musical instrument' repeats them back again. Chloe promises Daphnis ten kisses if he will tell her the origin of this phenomenon and so he begins his story, explaining that 'there are many kinds of nymphs - ash-tree nymphs, called Meliae, oak-tree nymphs, called Dryads, and nymphs of the marshes, called Heleioi. All are fair, all are makers of music. Echo was born the daughter of one of these ... the Muses taught her to play the pan-pipes and the flute, to sing to the lyre and the cithara.' She shunned mankind but Pan grew jelous and drove the shepherds and goatherds mad so that they tore her to pieces, still singing. Earth gave these shreds of music shelter and now they are able to portray the sounds of people and animals, just as Echo once had done. 'When Daphnis ended his story, Chloe gave him not ten but ten-score kisses - for the echo had all but repeated what he said, as though to witness that he told no lie.'

To go out and walk far in the forest

2011-10-07T15:55:00.002+01:00

Badelunda, Sweden

Source: Wikimedia Commons

I was glad to hear that Tomas Tranströmer has won the Nobel Prize and have been looking today through my copy of his New Collected Poems, translated by Robin Fulton. Here is my guide to some of the imagery you'll find in his poetry.

Snow. In an earlier post I talked about a poem, 'From March 1979', in which Tranströmer goes to a snow-covered island and sees in the tracks of the deer 'language but no words.' Language itself suffers in the still, cold February of another poem, 'Face to Face', where there is deep snow and 'footprints grew old out on the crust. / Under a tarpaulin language pined.' But the onset of a snowfall can seem as joyful as music ('C Major') and when winter ends eventually, as in the poem 'Noon Thaw', the world has a new language: 'the vowels were blue sky and the consonants were black twigs and the speech was soft over the snow.'
Stillness. In that dead winter of 'Face to Face', 'living stood still' and 'the soul / chafed against the landscape.' But eventually, one day, colours flared and 'everything turned around. / The earth and I sprang towards each other'. Elsewhere in Tranströmer there are moments of quiet contemplation, 'Weather Picture' for instance, where the October sea glistens coldly and all sounds are 'in slow flight'. 'Breathing Space July' contains three moments of stillness, lying under a tree, looking into the water, and sleeping. And in 'Slow Music' he writes of a day down by the water, 'among large stones with peaceful backs', where 'you can stand in the sun with your eyes shut / and feel yourself being slowly blown forward.'
Summer. In a prose poem, 'The Blue House', Tranströmer stands ina dense forest under 'a night of radiant sun.' 'A ship's engine far away on the water expands the summer-night horizon. Both joy and sorrow swell in the dew's magnifying glass.' But those sunlit Swedish summers will eventually fade until the sounds of the forest flow 'into a single melancholy murmer' ('The Cuckoo'). In 'Lament' the writer notices the slow coming of night. 'The moths settle on the window pane: / small pale telegrams from the world.'
Song. In 'Song' Tranströmer recalls the legend of Väinämöinen, the eternal bard of the Kalevala, riding over the sea. He also listens at nightfall to the abortive music of gulls on a dark skerry. You can hear birdsong in many of his poems - 'Ringing', 'Morning Birds', 'Memories Look at Me', 'Early May Stanzas', 'The Nightingale in Badelunda'. The last of these describes a moment when time stopped as he listened to 'the raw resonant notes that whet the night sky's gleaming scythe.'
Stars. 'Orion hangs above the ground-frost...'; 'Silent constellations. And the cold ocean.' Tranströmer poems often take place at night, although the stars may merely be glimpsed, up through the grating of winter. In an early poem, 'Epilogue', he describes the evening star like an X-ray, developing a hidden landscape of houses, trees and fences. And then a storm comes in and the stars seem to signal for help, 'lit and quenched by headlong clouds / that only when they shade the light betray / their presence.'
Sleep. In 'Tracks' a train stops in the middle of a plain - 'bright moonlight, few stars' - and far away there are the lights of a town. It is like a dream that the sleeper will not remember. Sleep and dreams recur throughout Tranströmer's poetry and indeed the opening lines of the first poem in his first collection describe that moment of awakening when 'consciousness can grasp the world / as the hand grips a sun-warmed stone.' 'The Man who Awoke with Singing over the Roofs' evokes that same feeling, when the sleeper 'begins / groping for attention's instruments'.
Storms. Sometimes the poet is woken by a storm. In 'Autumnal Archipelago' he listens in the darkness to 'constellations stamping inside their stalls, high over the tree-tops'. Similarly, 'A Winter Night' begins with this memorable image: 'the storm put its mouth to the house / and blows to produce a note.' These experiences suggest a simile in 'Agitated Meditation': 'a storm drives the mill sails wildly round / in the night's darkness, grinding nothing. - You / are kept awake by the same laws...'
Silence. Other times the nights are quiet: in 'Nocturne', the trees keep 'silence in concord with each other.' In 'Five Stanzas to Thoreau', Tranströmer talks of silence slowly spiralling from the earth to grow 'with its burgeoning crown to shade his sun-heated doorstep.' Thus silence seems sought after at times - in 'Along the Radius' he sits by an ice-bound river on an upturned boat 'swallowing the drug of silence'. But in 'April and Silence' Spring lies desolate and 'the only thing I want to say / glitters out of reach / like the silver / in a pawnbrokers.'
Solitude. In 'Alone', Tranströmer says 'I must be alone / Ten minutes in the morning / and ten minutes in the evening / without a programme.' Earlier in this poem he is walking on the frozen fields of Östergötland and doesn't see a single person. Other solitary artists appear in his poems - Thoreau 'disappearing deep in his inner greenness' and Grieg in his work-cottage, 'shut in with silence.' In 'Solitary Swedish Houses' everything seems to stand alone and summer comes with 'flaxen-haired rain / or one solitary thunder-cloud / above a barking dog.'
Sunlight. Finally, the transformative effect of sunlight is evident in poems like 'Landscape with Suns', where the poet takes the memory of a glowing sun back to 'the half dead grey forest / where we have to work and live.' 'Further In' describes an evening when he is driving through thick traffic. A low red sun streaming in through his windscreen makes him feel transparent, so that 'writing becomes visible / inside me'. Right then, he knows he must 'get far away / straight through the city and then / further until it is time to go out / and walk far in the forest.'

At the Loch of the Green Corrie

2011-10-02T16:17:00.000+01:00

Andrew Greig is a Scottish novelist, poet and mountaineering writer who I think I first read in Alec Finlay's anthology The Way to Cold Mountain (2001). There he had a short prose piece called 'By the Loch of the Green Corrie' about a quest to find and fish in the loch that the poet Norman MacCaig (1910-96) had considered his favourite spot in the world. The loch's location is revealed by an old friend of MacCaig and Grieg then heads off, accompanied by two friends (better fishermen than he) to try to find it. 'It's a gem all right. Yes, green rough grass and screeds of grey scree. Held in a bowl, secluded, quiet, its own world. Quinag in the distance. Nothing else.' They fish all day but get no catches. The mist comes in. 'Sounds of water, wind over grass, occasional shrill keek of a lone bird of prey. The Loch of the Green Corrie began to sink into me.' They stay for another day but still no luck. They pack up and leave. 'We're grubby, fish-free but feeling very alive, in touch, refreshed. The homage is done, for this year.'

'The slope opposite rises like a breaking frozen wave of grey and green'

Screen dump showing my own attempt to locate the Loch of the Green Corrie, whilst sitting here using Google Earth

A book-length homage, expanded from this original essay, appeared last year, the centenary of MacCaig's birth. The account of the fishing trip is fuller and longer, with the addition of an extra day and digressions on poetry, geology, land-ownership and the right way to live. I felt quite envious, never having myself camped out in the Highlands or experienced a Hemingwayesque fishing holiday (or even, come to think of it, met anyone who owns a fishing rod), but I did smile to myself when the trip ended with the three friends abandoning their tents to head off for some posh hotel food. There they raise a glass to MacCaig, whose own poems and observations on the landscape are scattered through this book. In 'Descent from the Green Corrie', for example, MacCaig describes the walk down 'on screes or boggy asphodel. / And the elation that for a moment fills you / Beside the misty cairn's that lesser thing, / A memory of it.'

The book ends with an account of Andrew Greig's return to the area in 2008, to interview some of Norman MacCaig's surviving friends and have one more go at catching the fish. Again he spends hours there, until the far side of the corrie begins to lose colour and 'a pale spiral swirls and flattens, coming this way. A rattling sound, then in a drenching blow the hail squall hits.' So he leaves empty handed, but on his way home manages at last to catch a fish, in a loch of his own choosing. And there the book ends, although Greig was back again last year, this time with Billy Connolly, fiddler Aly Bain and a BBC film crew. A brief clip shows it to have been extremely bracing weather; after a massive overnight snowstorm Connolly is trying to put a fly on his rod and is heard to complain "Could Norman no'like Jamaica or something?"

City Links

2011-09-30T11:53:00.000+01:00

I used to imagine, sitting at a screen in the city, some kind of remote aural connection to a wild landscape. Perhaps this is now possible - some durable, unobtrusive, solar-powered device hidden in the cliffs at Zennor for example, transmitting the sound of waves to my computer here. As long ago as 1967 the composer and sound artist Maryanne Amacher set up microphones that could feed sounds back from five sites round the city of Buffalo. Later she installed 'a microphone on a window overlooking the ocean at the New England Fish Exchange in Boston Harbour, transmitting the sound into her home studio continuously, sometimes using it as an element in other performances or exhibitions of City Links. “I would come in and it would be different according to different weather and changes,” Amacher told interview Leah Durner in 1989 ... She lived with the live transmission for three years. “I actually miss coming home to it,” she says now, some 20 years later.' This quote comes from a 1999 Wire article; you can see a few photographs on the Maryanne Amacher Archive Project website (sadly it looks as if this has not been updated recently and a year ago they were asking for more funds).

It seems paradoxical to go to the trouble of listening to the world but played over the top of the 'real' soundscape surrounding you. I wonder what John Cage thought of this? Amacher worked with Cage on his Lecture on the Weather (1975), a composition 'for 12 speaker-vocalists (or instrumentalists), preferably American men who have become Canadian citizens, each using his own sound system given an equalization distinguishing it from the others ... The performance starts with the reading of the preface. In it Cage expresses his disgust with the institutions of American government. After that the work starts, the 12 men reading and singing text fragments by Henry David Thoreau, and/or play instruments (ad lib.). In part 1 this is accompanied by sounds (on tape) of wind and in part 2 by sounds of rain. In the third part the lights in the performance-space are dimmed and the performers are accompanied by the film and the sounds of thunder. The film consists of Thoreau drawings, printed in negative, the projection resembling lightning (white on black).' Lecture on the Weather goes well beyond the simple notion of a soundscape. It represents (in the words of Joan Retallack) a collision of political and environmental climates, like ' the complex chaotic condition of interpenetration and obstruction in which we live, a fragile balance of order and disorder, clarity and cacophony.'

High Arctic

2011-09-25T17:40:00.000+01:00

I've talked here before about the ongoing Cape Farewell project which takes a group of artists and scientists each year to the Arctic. Last year's trip sailed around Svalbard and among those on board were poet Nick Drake and artist Matt Clark of United Visual Artists. They have now collaborated on an installation for the National Maritime Museum: High Arctic. It is described as 'an exhibition with no touchscreens, no static photographs, and no panels with text: instead High Arctic is a genuinely immersive, responsive environment. Ultraviolet torches unlock hidden elements, constantly shifting patterns of graphics and text that react to visitors approaching; an archipelago of thousands of columns fills the gallery space, each representing a real glacier in Svalbard; an artificial horizon borders the gallery as a seamless canvas of light, shifting in intensity and colour. A Max Eastley and Henrik Ekeus-designed generative soundscape flows through the gallery, weaving in the voices of arctic explorers across the centuries as well as the poetry of Nick Drake.'

The exhibition looks into a future where we will have to imagine the Arctic as it once was. As you walk on what seem to be pristine snowfields dark patches spread around you, and ice-floes break up as if melted by your torch. When the voices are silent you can hear the bleak sound of wind whistling over the ice. Each ice column has the name of one of Svalbard's disappearing glaciers on it, which appears and then vanishes when you move the light over it. These minimal white blocks and their arrangement in the museum space reminded me of Rachel Whiteread's Embankment at Tate Modern, which was a response to her own Cape Farewell trip in 2005. I took my sons along to High Arctic today and they really enjoyed interacting with the lights and exploring the labyrinth of ice blocks. I see that, according to an article in Wired, the scale of these was 'based on Lego models because, as team member Ben Kreukniet explains, “Lego is awesome.”'

Before the melt-waters

2011-09-23T11:45:00.001+01:00

My copy of The Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales has a landscape by David Jones on the cover, painted in the twenties when he went to live with Eric Gill and others at Capel-y-ffin in the Black Mountains. The book describes Jones' long poem The Anathemata (1952) as 'at once devotional and commemorative, a celebration of Christian mysteries and a recalling of the making - both geological and cultural - of Britain ... The poem draws its material mainly from Celtic, Latin and Teutonic 'deposits' underlying London and Wales, and from English literature.' Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair have followed a similar path in their recent writings (London Orbital quotes 'The Lady of the Pool' section of The Anathemata, in which Jones uncovers the mythic strata of the City). But before the poem reaches London, before following the waves of ship-borne settlers whose culture has shaped Britain, there is a section called 'Rite and Fore-Time' which describes the formation of the land itself. What I like about these lines is the way they too contain 'Celtic, Latin and Teutonic 'deposits'', projected back onto Ice Age Britain, 'before the melt-waters / had drumlin-dammed a high hill-water for the water-maid / to lave her maiden hair.'

He says for example, that it is long ages since these melt-waters 'troughed, in solid Ordovician / his Bala bed for Tacitus. / Long, long ago they'd turned the flow about. / But had they as yet morained / where holy Deva's entry is? / Or pebbled his mere, where / still the Parthenos / she makes her devious exit?' A footnote explains some of these etymological references: Bala is also called Pimblemere, and in Welsh, Llyn Tegid, the Lake of Tacitus. Jones adds that 'it may be noted that Tacitus was the name of Cunedda's great grandfather' (the kind of fact that these days we can find instantly and then pursue as far as we like). He also explains in the footnote that the lake 'is formed of solid rock but the S. W. end at least is thought to have been influenced by morainic deposits. At some remote geological period the outflow was southward whereas now the Dee flows northward through the lake, but, says immemorial tradition, the two waters never mingle.'

Lake Bala

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The poem goes on to describe the movement south of glacial material, 'heaped amorphous / out of Caledonia / into Cambria.' It was from the Southern Uplands, Jones notes, that 'geological deposits of the Ice Age and certain legendary and historical deposits of the sub-Roman age came to Wales.' At the same time ice sheets from Ireland, Scotland and the Lake District converged into the depression of the Irish Sea and moved south, 'part thrust against the land mass of North Wales' (here Jones' footnote quotes Brit. Reg. Geol. N. Wales pp77-8). Microgranites and clay-bonded erratics were wrenched away and carried 'with what was harrowed-out in via, up, from the long drowned out-crops, under, coalesced and southed by the North Channel.' And then the description of glacial action ends with the strange image of St Brendan on his sea horse. A footnote explains that glaciation extended 'just beyond the waters between South Wales and Ireland, which very many millenia later became associated with the marvel-voyages of the Celtic ascetics; such as the navigation-saint, Brendan, who in the legend rides the narrow channel on a marine creature and hails Finbar, mounted on David's swimming horse, with the words 'God is marvellous in his saints.''

Soft pink landscape

2011-09-17T10:06:00.000+01:00

Earlier this week I was sad to read Waldemar Januszczak tweet 'Oh no, Richard Hamilton died this morning. That is a HUGE loss. Probably Britain's most important post-war artist.' But, as he went on to say, 'Richard Hamilton was working on a big touring retrospective when he died. So at least there is that to look forward to.' Back in 1992 I went to a sizable retrospective at the Tate Gallery and have just been re-reading the catalogue. This reminded me that five years before his famous collage, Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?, Hamilton was helping to make large map-models of New Towns (Harlow, Basildon and Speke) for the Festival of Britain's Exhibition of Architecture, Town Planning and Building Research. There is a small black and white photograph of one of these in the catalogue (like a Ghost Box album cover), where it is contrasted with Landscape (1965-6). This later work is mixed media added to an enlarged postcard image of the South Downs - panoramic landscape as a 'self-reflexive, game-playing switching of representational codes, rather than as a mimetic, miniaturised simulation of the new Socialist Britain.'

In the early sixties Hamilton was struck by a new advertising campaign for Andrex toilet paper that featured photographs of girls posed in a forest glade. He described the scene: 'Nature is beautiful. Pink from a morning sun filters through a tissue of autumn leaves. Golden shafts gleam through the the perforated vaulting of the forest to illuminate a stage set-up for the Sunday supplement voyeur.' It is a masturbatory fantasy: 'the woodland equipped with every convenience. A veil of soft-focus vegetation screens the peeper from the sentinel. Poussin? Claude? No, more like Watteau in its magical ambiguity.' In Soft pink landscape (1971-2) he reproduces this scene in misty paint, as if seen through half-closed eyes, with a roll of Andrex placed on the ground.

In 1975 Hamilton exhibited Andrex-inspired work at the Serpentine Gallery along with other landscape views derived from postcards. Some of these show Miers, the French spa noted for the laxative properties of its waters. There were also nine pastel images of sunsets, each with a giant turd in the foreground. One further view was of sunrise over Cadaqués with a turd blotting out its church, and Hamilton linked this with Jung's account of a dream he had: 'the cathedral, the blue sky, God sits on his throne, high above the world - and an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the cathedral asunder.' Hamilton's interest in the Andrex adverts continued and in 1980 he completed Soft blue landscape (the cover of the Tate's 1992 exhibition catalogue, below, shows a detail from this painting, omitting the toilet roll). It was at this point that Hamilton discovered the rather surprising identity of an artist who had actually worked on the original 1960s Andrex campaign... Bridget Riley.

One streak of dying light

2011-09-11T15:07:00.000+01:00

Landscapes, finished in 1949 and premiered by the San Francisco Symphony in 1953, is the earliest work for orchestra by Chinese-American composer Chou Wen-chung. It uses three traditional Chinese melodies to create three different 'landscapes': 'Under the Cliff in the Bay,' 'The Sorrow of Parting,' and 'One Streak of Dying Light.' The titles come from poems by Cheng Hsieh (1693-1765), Ting P’eng (c. 1661) and Liu Chi (1311-75). You can read the full poems and see the score on the composer's excellent website. The third one, for example, reads: 'Green, green the grass west of the pavilion,/ The clouds low, the cries of the wild geese faint,/ Two lines of sparse willows, /One streak of dying light, /Hundreds of homing ravens dotting the sky.'

In the years following Landscapes Chou worked as student and assistant to Edgard Varèse (the manuscript for Déserts was written out by him). He also continued to compose his own landscape-inspired music; in 1956 for example came And the Fallen Petals, based on a poem by Meng Hao-jan (689-740). He says 'in this work I have tried to convey through sound the emotional qualities of Chinese landscape painting and to achieve this end with the same economy of means ... In this as well as in my other works to date, I am influenced by the philosophy that governs every Chinese artist, whether he be poet or painter; namely, affinity to nature in conception, allusiveness in expression, and terseness in realization.' The music is in three sections: 'Part 1: Against a quiet and mysterious landscape, budding blossoms dance the praise of life in the Spring wind', 'Part 2: A storm breaks and the furious wind drives the dazed petals far and wide,' 'Part 3: Against a quiet and mysterious landscape, the fallen petals are being swept away and fresh blossoms on the branches dance in the Spring wind.'

Chou's long career continues and his most recent piece is from 2009, Ode to Eternal Pine, dedicated to Elliott Carter (who is still going strong in his second century). He says of this that 'in East Asian cultures, the pine, often seen on mountain peaks, is a symbol of longevity and the eternity of nature. “Meditating on Eternity” is a reflection on the fundamental esthetic principle of East Asia, as expressed in the Chinese terms tian di ren, heaven, earth and humanity. It suggests human emotion within the timelessness of the universe and the physical constraints on earth, the two axes symbolized by the subsequent movements, “Lofty Peaks” and “Profound Gorges.”' I was reminded of these two axes while reading an interesting interview with Chou, where he says that back in 1977 he had been responsible for selecting a traditional Chinese zither piece called 'Flowing water' for inclusion on the Voyager golden records - music that has now left behind the physical constraints of earth on its journey out into the universe.

A falcon flew across the marsh, weaving through the wind

2011-09-10T18:15:00.000+01:00

On Thursday Radio 4 are broadcasting a new play by Helen Macdonald about that classic of English nature writing, J. A. Baker's The Peregrine (1967). It will be, I'm told, "a strange thing", comparing Baker's pursuit of wild falcons with Helen's own experiences keeping a goshawk called Mabel. The play has been produced by Tim Dee, who wrote in his own bird memoir, The Running Sky, about his fascination with the book and its strange author, who seemed to lose himself in a quest to follow the peregrine wherever it took him: 'earthed, haggard and self-loathing, traipsing through marshes, crouching in ditches and lurking on field edges.' Whether Helen ended up in this state too we shall be able to hear next week.

Robert Macfarlane's preface to the 2005 NYRB edition of The Peregrine noted that little is known of Baker's life beyond what is recorded in his book. This mystery has added to the aura surrounding him over the years (in a way reminiscent to me of Robert Johnson, who in 1961 could be described on King of the Delta Blues Singers as 'little, very little more than a name on aging index cards and a few dusty master records in the files of a phonograph company that no longer exists'). But (as with Johnson) investigators have now unearthed more information and it turns out that when he wasn't on the trail of falcons or composing his visionary masterpiece, Baker managed the Chelmsford branch of the AA. This new biographical material has been included in the introduction to The Complete Works of J. A. Baker, published earlier this year. In addition to The Peregrine this volume has a selection of diary entries devoted to bird watching, The Hill of Summer (Baker's second, almost-forgotten book) and an essay, On the Essex Coast.

'Detailed descriptions of landscape are tedious,' writes Baker at the start of The Peregrine, and indeed he never needs to amass detail to convey a vivid and original sense of place. By omitting all reference to identifiable locations (500 of which actually appear in the newly published diary selections), Baker strips his landscape down to the shapes and colours and sensory impressions that a falcon might experience. Mark Cocker (in his introduction to The Peregrine) says that 'for Baker devotees this compositional device has given rise to a kind of sport, as they try to tease out a real geography behind the otherwise anonymous descriptions.' But equally, it has the effect of transforming Baker's corner of Essex into a universal landscape.

The Peregrine draws on observations made over a ten year period but is written as if they all took place in one year. I have quoted below some of the opening lines to convey a sense of the way Baker often sets the scene with a distilled, imagistic landscape description. The first entry in the book is for October 1st, when he finds a peregrine and watches as it picks off a jay (too vivid and conspicuous against the green water-meadows) and vows to follow him all winter, sharing 'the fear, and the exultation, and the boredom, of the hunting life.' The last entry is on April 4th, when he pursues the peregrine until he is able to crawl to a position five yards away, right in front of the bird, whose eyes look into his but seem to see something beyond 'from which they cannot look away.'

October 14th: One of those rare autumn days, calm under high cloud, mild, with patches of distant sunlight circling round and rafters of blue sky crumbling into mist...
October 30th: The wind-shred banner of the autumn light spanned the green headland between the two estuaries...
November 2nd: The whole land shone golden-yellow, bronze, and rusty-red, gleamed water-clear, submerged in brine of autumn light...
November 11th: Wisps of sunlight in a bleak of cloud, gulls bone-white in ashes of sky...
November 16th: The valley was calm, magnified in mist, domed with a cold adamantine glory...
November 21st: A wrought-iron starkness of leafless trees stands sharply up along the valley skyline...
December 8th: Golden leaves of sunlight drifted down through the morning fog...
December 15th: The warm west gale heaved and thundered across the flat river plain, crashed and threshed high its crests of airy spray against the black breakwater of the wooded ridge...
January 5th: Broken columns of snow towered over lanes dug from ten foot drifts. Roads were ridged and fanged with white ice, opaque and shiny as frozen rivers...
February 10th: This was a day made absolute, the sun unflawed, the blue sky pure...
March 10th: Towering white clouds grew in the marble sunlight of the morning. The wind eroded them to falling weirs of rain. The estuary at high tide brimmed with blue and silver light, then tarnished and thinned to grey. A falcon flew across the marsh, weaving through the wind...

Bless all ports.

2011-09-02T14:04:00.002+01:00

Well, summer is over - the coldest for eighteen years apparently and, as The Tate's Vorticism exhibition also comes to an end, it is perhaps excusable to curse the English climate 'for its sins and infections'. The Vorticist Manifesto blasts our 'flabby sky that can manufacture no snow, but can only drop the sea on us in a drizzle like a poem by Mr. Robert Bridges.' But at the same time, claims that 'the English Character is based on the Sea' and blesses England's

PORTS, RESTLESS MACHINES OF    | scooped out basins
                                                               | heavy insect dredgers
                                                               | monotonous cranes
                                                               | stations
                                                               | lighthouses, blazing
                                                               |     through the frosty
                                                               |     starlight, cutting the
                                                               |     storm like a cake
   | beaks of infant boats,
   | side by side,
                                                               | heavy chaos of
                                                               |     wharves,
   | steep walls of
                                                               |     factories
                                                               | womanly town

There follows a list of the great ports, including Newcastle, which is portrayed a few pages later in a Vorticist woodcut by Edward Wadsworth. The Tate exhibition includes a similar print, called simply Port, and it was a subject Wadsworth would return to throughout his career (although his later harbour views are much less interesting). During the First World War Wadsworth was involved in the application of dazzle camouflage to allied ships and used this experience in what may be his most famous port scene, Dazzle-ship in Drydock at Liverpool (1919). Roy Behrens has recently unearthed a photograph of Wadsworth painting this - you can see it on his Camoupedia blog.

Edward Wadsworth, Newcastle, 1914

Rain-saturated, churning, chanting thunder

2011-08-29T11:35:00.000+01:00

The education in Latin shared by English gentlemen was obviously an influence on their landscape gardening. As Tim Richardson puts it in The Arcadian Friends, 'from the schoolroom to the garden, Virgil set the scene, Horace set the tone, Cicero inspired the political iconography, Pliny extolled the creature comforts, and Ovid directed the sensual fantasy narrative.' Beyond this basic pantheon it is interesting to consider any other writers who touched on landscape themes or inspired future landscape thinking. One example, less well-known today, was Persius (Aulus Persius Flaccus) who lived in Rome and died young (his dates were 34-62). His Sixth Satire was translated by Dryden in the 1690s. In it, a land-owner rejoices in his life free from the concerns of business and state: 'here I enjoy my private Thoughts' and do not care if crops fail or neighbouring farmers have 'a larger Crop than mine.' However, the poem is not concerned with farming or landscape specifically, its general theme is 'an admirable common-place of Moral Philosophy; Of the true Use of Riches'.

The erudite Joseph Addison had read more widely than these Latin writers and in a piece for The Spectator in 1712 showed off his knowledge of Greek: 'my compositions on gardening are altogether after the Pindarick manner, and run into the beautiful wildness of nature, without affecting the nicer elegancies of art.' According to Richardson, 'Pindar's verse mingles an admiration of the grandeur of raw nature with an ability to complement its changefulness and variety through elegant expression.' This makes him sound like an interesting wilderness poet, although as with Persius there is no direct writing on landscape in his Odes. Addison was probably thinking more about the way Pindar wrote. Horace, for example, compared Pindar's writing to a wild landscape: 'a river bursts its banks and rushes down a mountain with uncontrollable momentum, rain-saturated, churning, chanting thunder – there you have Pindar's style...'

Pindar (Roman copy after a Greek original of the 5th century BCE)

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Valley of the Shadow of Death

2011-08-28T15:22:00.000+01:00

Jonathan Tyers, the owner of Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, had his own private estate at Denbies in Surrey. There he named an 8-acre woodland 'Il Penseroso' after Milton's poem - perhaps, as Tim Richardson says in his book The Arcadian Friends, Tyers 'viewed Vauxhall Gardens as its equivalent, the more jocund L'Allegro' and the melancholy woodland as 'a kind of penance for the jolly hedonism of Vauxhall.' In this wooded part of the garden there was a hermitage called the Temple of Death which contained, in addition to a memorial to garden designer Lord Petre, a model of a white raven and a clock that chimed every minute, to remind visitors of the transience of life. Black leather-bound copies of Edward Young's Night Thoughts and Robert Blair's The Grave were available for perusal on a table. Beyond the hermitage was a gateway with posts made from upright coffins, 'its arch surmounted by a pair of human skulls (reputedly real - one belonging to a highwayman, the other a prostitute's)'. This was the entrance to the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Here the two artists Tyers had previously employed at Vauxhall were asked to decorate the interior of a temple. Either side of an allegorical statue by Louis-François Roubiliac were paintings by Francis Hayman: The Death of a Christian (peaceful and accompanied by an angel) and The Death of an Unbeliever (about to be speared by a leering skeleton). Richardson concludes that 'any visitors who arrived thinking they might have an amusing time with the happy-go-lucky proprietor of Vauxhall Gardens were in for a disappointment.'

William Blake, illustration intended for the 1805

publication of Blair's poem 'The Grave'

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Back Bay Fens

2011-08-17T17:15:00.001+01:00

Frederick Law Olmsted, Plan for the Back Bay Fens, 1887

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Within the essays and conversation that make up Landscape Theory (see my previous post), there are many interesting comments that could serve as the basis for posts here, but I'll just pick one example for now. In the course of the seminar Anne Whiston Spirn observed that we no longer perceive some works of landscape art as having been designed and constructed. Frederick Law Olmsted's plan for the Back Bay Fens, for instance, was 'the first attempt, so far as I know, to construct a wetland. Olmsted proposed the Fens as a combination of utility and beauty, a restoration of polluted tidal marsh flats to serve human needs. The power of that restoration wasn't lost on people in Boston at the time, but within a generation people forgot that it was constructed.' So, Spirn asked, 'how did Olmsted move from the pastoral, pictorial style he had used in Central Park, to the idea of reconstructing a marsh? Well, Martin Johnson Heade had been painting coastal marshes north of Boston. Perhaps his paintings influenced Olmsted. Certainly they must have contributed to public acceptance of Olmsted's revolutionary proposal.'

Martin Johnson Heade, Marsh with a Hunter, 1874

Theoryscapes

2011-08-16T18:01:00.001+01:00

Landscape Theory (2008), edited by Rachael Ziady DeLue and James Elkins, is Volume Six in the 'Art Seminar' series, which addresses current issues in writing about art through roundtable discussions and invited contributions. It is a really rich and readable anthology of writing about landscape; the theory doesn't get too heavy despite the forbidding cover - an empty seminar table rather than a picturesque landscape. Interestingly, one contributor to the book, Jill H. Casid, noticed the way that the general preface to the whole series, written by Elkins, is actually 'implicated in the discourse of landscape with its rehearsal of what we might call the metaphorics of theoryscaping. Current writing on the visual arts is compared to a "trackless thicket" in order to assert that it is "not a wilderness." Instead, visual graphs (that are given the look of geological formations [they are 3D area charts]) convert "theory in art history" into a "landscape of interpretive strategies" through which the series offers a well-blazed and navigable trail.'

I thought it might be interesting here to try to summarise briefly the seminar discussion (70 pages in the book!) and in doing so add links to some relevant earlier posts on this blog. The event took place in June 2006 at the Burren College of Art in Ireland and brought together art history, geography and landscape architecture academics (plus an independent scholar - Rebecca Solnit). James Elkins opened the discussion by remarking that in the years since the original publication of Denis Cosgrove's influential Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (1984), it has become increasingly possible to move beyond the idea of landscape-as-ideology. There was general agreement to this, including from Cosgrove himself, who nonetheless recalled that his book had been a reaction against two then-prevalent ways of thinking about landscape: as the romantic, aesthetic response to nature or as more scientific, geographical analysis. Elkins introduced a third notion, landscape as a work of physical production, leading to discussion of the etymology of 'landscape' - the OED defines it in relation to art but another root is the Old English 'landscipe', which concerns the shaping of a place. A fourth version of landscape, the representation of space and time ('landscope') provoked discussion of the priviledged position of the observer in art history and those 'timeless' landscapes without figures, like Ansel Adams' photographs of Yosemite.

The problems of separation - either by framing a view or more generally from the unbridgable distance between observer and those actively shaping the landscape - led to the first mention of phenomenology as a way of thinking more about our experience of landscape. Jessica Dubow talked about the recent turn to phenomenology in cultural geography, which has moved beyond the study of images (or images-as-texts) to a more direct encounter where the subject is inside the landscape. There was some further discussion of ideology and whether it is helpful to think of 'landscapes' in the postmodern global cultural economy (Arjun Appadurai's notions of 'finance-scapes', 'techno-scapes' and so on). But the last words of the morning session were Denis Cosgrove's, concluding that a focus on virtual spaces 'raises issues in relation to the materiality of landscape that phenomenology emphasizes.'

The conversation recommenced with discussion of the extent to which landscape became less central to twentieth century art. David Hays referred to a different trend in landscape architecture, where art has become less influential: ecological concerns now dominate and 'art' is seen as almost a dirty word (although there are exceptions - Anne Whiston Spirn mentioned Martha Schwartz's Splice Garden). The discussion then turned to maps, panoramas and their military origins and from map-making to the distinction between cartography, the conceptual visualisation of the landscape, and chorography, a more sensory, descriptive approach. But in the midst of this I was struck by Denis Cosgrove's comment that 'mapping removes us a little from the suffocating embrace of ecology when thinking about the natural world and places and our relations to them.' Trenchant stuff - just as well no ecocritics had been invited! The absence of any ecological discussion in this seminar was interesting to me (since this blog has always focused on forms of landscape art, rather than environmental art) but disappointing too, given the natural expectation that there would be cutting edge theoretical thinking in this area.

At this point in the seminar James Elkins intervened to change the subject and ask whether it is possible to imagine landscapes outside of their representation in art. The subsequent discussion touched on the way tourists see Yosemite through the lens of Muybridge and Adams, partly because the park's infrastructure leads them to specific viewpoints. These photographs are social acts - people rarely take a view without posing in front of it - but such views are still based (for Elkins) on the late-Romantic Western tradition of painting and photography. This view has been put forward in Joseph Leo Koerner's writings on Friedrich and indeed one participant, Michael Newman, suggested that Friedrich's hyperreal style clearly pre-figures our contemporary digital landscapes. I was surprised there wasn't more exploration at this point of different perspectives, although participants did mention the Silent Traveller books, written in England by Chiang Yee, and the landscape architect Nicholas Brown, who 'walks somewhat in the spirit of Richard Long.' But time was obviously running short and after a few more questions from the audience Elkins closed the seminar, inviting participants to head out for a hike 'in what we persist in pretending is the actual landscape'.

The Burren landscape

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Landscape from Finnmark

2011-08-05T09:30:00.000+01:00

This week I popped into the National Gallery to see an interesting new exhibition: 'Forests, Rocks, Torrents: Norwegian and Swiss Landscapes from the Lunde Collection'. These two countries were in many ways very different in the nineteenth century - Switzerland prosperous, independent and rapidly industrialising, Norway poor, dominated by Denmark and Sweden and dependent on exporting its natural resources. Swiss artists tended to stay in Switzerland whereas the Norwegians tended to travel. The importance of getting away from the familiar is illustrated in the case of Peder Balke (1804-87) who studied art in Christiania and Stockholm and began his career painting conventional landscapes. In 1832, as Christopher Ropelle and Sarah Herring write in the catalogue, he travelled by ship to the North Cape, 'a rugged and largely inaccessible area of the country. There he found bleak and original motifs which allowed him to define his highly individual painting style. He continued to explore these motifs in increasingly austere images throughout his career.' The exhibition includes Landscape from Finnmark (about 1860), an icy view across snow-covered rocks to distant grey mountains, dominated by a single tree, leaning at an angle as if battered by the elements. The painting reproduced below is another of Balke's Finnmark scenes.

Peder Balke, From Hammerfest, 1851

Source: Wikimedia Commons

On entering the exhibition, the first thing you see is a large map on the wall, reproduced from an 1873 Baedecker on Switzerland, with pins showing locations of the paintings: The Wetterhorn, Lake Lucerne, the Valley of Lauterbrunnen and so on. There are also pin maps of Norway, based on Thomas B. Wilson's 'Handy Guide' to the country of 1888. These reminded me of another thing I've been doing this week: working on the Some Landscapes Timeline and Map. I am still compiling this so the screenshots below represent work in progress. The map shows a selection of places connected to my blog posts - I shall now be able to add a little Google pin on Finnmark. The timeline, similarly, is no more than another way of viewing the blog, but I suppose you could see it as a rather eccentric history of landscape and culture. So far it stretches from Sargon II's park at Ninevah (715 BCE) to Hamish Fulton's Everest ascent (2009). Some of the dates relate to paintings or publications but many involve encounters with landscape: Wang Po at the Pavilion of the Prince of T'eng, Dorothy Wordsworth in Scotland, Olivier Messiaen in Utah, and here, Peder Balke in Finnmark.

Climbing Mount Kagu

2011-07-28T21:44:00.000+01:00

Among the 4,500 poems which make up the Manyōshū ('Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves'), there is one attributed to the Emperor Jomei (593-641), called 'Climbing Mount Kagu'. It describes the view from the mountain down towards the land of Yamato: 'Over the wide plain the smoke-wreaths rise and rise, Over the wide lake the gulls are on the wing...' This translation, like others I have seen, omits the poem's descriptive epithet for Yamato, 'island of the dragonfly'. The phrase refers to the way a dragonfly's tail touches its mouth to form a ring, like the circle of mountains round the plain of Yamato. It is an example of a pillow-word (makura kotoba), which Geoffrey Bownas calls in his introduction to The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse (1964) 'a qualifier describing, by tradition, certain nouns or concepts.' Among other examples connected with actual places are 'rock running' for Ômi' (from the image of water gushing over rocks) and 'spring mist' used to modify Kasuga. Pillow-words are often likened to the Homeric stock epithet, although most of those describe people (ox-eyed Hera, swift-footed Achilles, laughter-loving Aphrodite) rather than places (Mycenae rich in gold). According to Bownas the comparison fails to do full justice to the essence and purpose of pillow-words, whose 'alliterative or assonantal ring' ensure that the reader pauses on the word being qualified. 'Further, since many of the head-words are place names, it is argued that part of the purpose of the pillow-word in its early use in primitive society was to act as a talisman for the good fortune of the place in question.' He goes on to provide his own example poem in the form of a donnish joke about Oxford's 'Heaven-preserve-it Western By-Pass'.

Pillow shot from Tokyo Story (Ozu-San.com)

The phrase 'pillow shot' has come to be used to describe the short transitional images of landscapes, interiors and objects that are such a distinctive feature of Yasujiro Ozu's cinema. There are many examples on the excellent Ozu-San website and a montage on Youtube (embedded below). The first scene of my favourite Ozu film, Tokyo Story (1953), shows an old couple, the Hirayamas, packing for their trip to Tokyo. The second takes place in the house belonging to their son, a doctor in the capital. We do not see the journey itself - instead the scenes are intercut with three pillow shots showing smokestacks (see above), a railway crossing and the sign outside their son's office. These are more than just establishing shots - as David Desser writes in his handbook to the film, 'careful examination of the exterior shots in the rest of the film reveals that the smokestacks and train station are, in fact spaces "connected" to Dr. Hirayama's, but nothing so indicates that at the start.' This connection resembles the way that particular words in early Japanese poetry were given associative pillow-words.

The ear/OAR label specialise in avant garde sounds and environmental recordings; landscape-related examples include Kiyoshi Mizutani's Scenery Of The Border, Francisco López's Trilogy of the Americas and the Phonography series. In 2007 they released a compilation of music inspired by Ozu's pillow-shots. A review in The Wire concluded that 'despite the range of idioms on display, from delicate electroacoustic tapestries (Bernhard Gunter) and meditative drones (Keith Berry) to bucolic field recordings (Kiyoshi Mizutani) and frequent uses of silence (almost all), each perfectly serves their respective image. Highlights include Steve Roden's beautiful pairing of chiming guitar and hushed percussive patterns; label owner Dale Lloyd's gently shifting gamelan shapes; and Taku Sugimoto's 'Tengu In Linguistics', where he drops six strident piano notes into a reductive vacuum, reflecting another of Ozu's themes, the eschewal of action in favour of the contemplation of the surrounding space.' Yasujiro Ozu - Hitokomakura followed an earlier compilation dedicated to Andrey Tarkovsky. The sequence was completed last year with a tribute to Michelangelo Antonioni.

Face to face with sheer mountains of water

2011-07-22T12:40:00.000+01:00

The main reason the last three posts have featured both James Wright and German literature is that I've been reading Wright's translations of Theodor Storm in The Rider on the White Horse, originally published in 1964. Wright's involvement in translating poetry from Spanish and German influenced a transformation in style around the time of The Branch Will Not Break (1963), in which he abandoned traditional poetic forms for a free verse that has been described as 'pastoral surrealism, built around strong images and a simple spoken rhetoric.' The second poem in that book actually begins with these lines of Theodor Storm: 'Dark cypresses- / The world is uneasily happy: / It will all be forgotten.' In The Rider on the White Horse it is wonderful to have nearly three hundred pages of German literature translated by such a good poet. It reminds me that another short novel that I've mentioned here, Adalbert Stifter's Rock Crystal, was translated in 1945 by Marianne Moore (with Elizabeth Mayer). And Elizabeth Mayer also collaborated with Louise Bogan on books by Goethe and Jünger, and translated Goethe's Italian Journey with W.H. Auden. (That journey came up earlier this week in the comments to my post on landscape seen through windows, when Mike C referred to Tischbein's sketch of Goethe leaning out of a window in Rome).

The Rider on the White Horse contains eight stories, many of which share a similar theme of thwarted love recollected in old age, and also a common setting: the North Friesland coast. 'Aquis Submersis', for example, starts with a description of heathland with its sweet clouds of erica and resinous bushes, a village with one single tall poplar and, out to the west, the 'luminous green of the marshes and, beyond them, the silver flood of the sea'. Maps and photographs of this distinctive landscape can be found on the Theodor Storm website. 'The Rider on the White Horse' (Der Schimmelreiter) is based on the legend of a horse and rider that appears when storms threaten the dikes. The New York Review Books site, calls it 'a story of devotion and disappointment, of pettiness and superstition, of spiritual pride and ultimate desolation, and of the beauty and indifference of the natural world.' It tells the life of Hauke Haien, dikemaster and rider of the white horse, who oversees the construction of a new dike only to see it threatened by the sea in a great storm. He rides out to stand 'face to face with sheer mountains of water that reared against the night sky, clambered up over one another's shoulders in the terrible twilight, and rushed, one white-crowned avalanche after another, against the shore ... The white horse pawed the ground and snorted into the storm, but the rider felt that here, at last, human strength had reached its limit. Now it was time for night to fall, and chaos, and death.'

The influence of landscape and weather is not confined to the end of this story - there is, for example, a winter festival (Eisboseln) on the frozen marshes, where Hauke wins acclaim for his victory in a game requiring a ball to be thrown across the fields towards a distant goal. But the main reason this is such an interesting combination of landscape and literature is that the story itself is about the reimagining and reshaping of the environment. It is a theme that can be written in practical or mythic terms, as is evident in Theodor Storm's blend of realism and Romanticism. There are echoes of Goethe's Faust, who towards the end of the play, is rewarded by the Emperor with permission to reclaim land from the sea, only to find his progress impeded by an old couple holding out against the development (a story we still see repeated, as in Donald Trump's construction of a golf course near Aberdeen). Storm describes the boy Hauke bringing some clay home with him, to sit by his father 'and there, by the light of a narrow tallow candle, he would model little dikes of all sizes and shapes; and then he would set them in a pan of water and try to re-create the beating of the waves against the shore. Or he would take out his writing slate and sketch the profile of the dike - the side facing the sea - as he felt it ought to look.' Then, years later, as the dikemaster he is able to contemplate his grand project: 'the tide was low and the golden sunlight of September gleamed on the naked strip of mud, a hundred feet or so across, and into the deep watercourse through which, even now, the sea was pouring. "It could be dammed up," Hauke murmured...'

Rome must be like the clouds

2011-07-16T20:28:00.000+01:00

A reference to one of Joseph von Eichendorff's poems in that last post reminds me that I've not previously mentioned here one of my favourite Romantic Novellen, his 'Life of a Good-for-Nothing' (1826). Its guileless hero makes his way to Italy... 'Eventually, when I had covered quite a distance, I gathered that I was only a few miles from Rome. This filled me with joy, for when I was a child at home I had heard many wonderful stories of the splendour of this city. As I lay on the grass outside the mill on Sunday afternoons and everything around was so quiet, I used to think that Rome must be like the clouds moving above me, with wonderful mountains and ravines going down to the blue sea, and golden gates, and tall gleaming towers on which the golden-robed angels were singing. Night had fallen long since, and the moon was shining brightly when I finally came out of the wood onto a hilltop and suddenly saw the city in the distance. The sea was glimmering far off, the immeasurable heavens were twinkling and sparkling with their countless stars, and below them lay the Holy City, of which only a long strip of mist was visible, like a sleeping lion on the quiet earth, while the hills stood round like dark giants watching over it.' (trans. F.G. Nichols)

He walks on over 'a wide, lonely heath' and on to the city where 'the tall palaces and gates and the golden cupolas gleamed in the bright moonlight.' We have entered a Rome of the northern imagination here, with the same appeal as that dream image of 'Amerika' in Kafka's novel (which I quoted from here in an earlier post). Eichendorff's hero goes 'past a few small houses and then through a magnificent gate into the renowned city of Rome. The moon shone between the palaces and down into the streets as though it were broad daylight, but the streets were all deserted except for the occasional ragged fellow lying in a marble doorway in the warm night and sleeping like the dead. The fountains were plashing in the silent squares, and the gardens along the street were rustling and filling the air with refreshing scents.' In Rome he encounters a painter and visits his studio in the attic of an old house, where we are given one of those images of the Romantic artist at the window I described yesterday. 'The painter flung the window open, so that the fresh morning air swirled through the whole room. There was a marvellous outlook over the city and towards the mountains, with the early sun shining on the white villas and vineyards. "Here's to our cool green Germany beyond those mountains!" cried the painter, drinking from the bottle he then passed to me. I responded to him politely and in my heart I thought again and again of my beautiful distant home.'

From a Bus Window in Central Ohio, Just Before a Thunder Shower

2011-07-15T13:26:00.002+01:00

One of the James Wright poems in The Branch Will Not Break that I didn't mention in my previous post is 'From a Bus Window in Central Ohio, Just Before a Thunder Shower'. The view through a window provides a natural frame for a 'landscape poem', although if a fixed point of view is required that hammock at William Duffy's farm would do just as well. Looking out of the bus in central Ohio, James Wright saw 'cribs loaded with roughage huddle together / before the north clouds', poplars, silver maples leaves and an old farmer calling 'a hundred black-and-white Holsteins / from the clover field.' It would be great to compile an anthology of 'window poetry' like this, and from my landscape perspective I would be tempted to group them according to what was being seen: storms, sunsets, industrial landscapes, rural scenes, or just some cropped fragment of a city or the slowly moving branches of a tree. A more interesting arrangement might reflect the nature of the frame itself: windows open and closed, windows in castles and palaces, in suburban houses, office buildings, hospital wards, school rooms, prison cells, or the windows of trains, aeroplanes, buses, still or in motion. A third version of the anthology would order poems according to the nature of the viewer: their identity, their attitude and their mood, projected onto the landscape beyond the window.

In his classic 1955 essay, 'The Open Window and the Storm-Tossed Boat: An Essay in the Iconography of Romanticism' Lorenz Eitner describes a favourite theme in Romantic literature: 'the poet at the window surveys a distant landscape and is troubled by a desire to escape from his narrow existence into the world spread out before him' The example he gives is Eichendorff's poem 'Longing' where the golden stars and sound of a distant post-horn make the poet's heart ache to travel out into the summer night. 'The window is like a threshold and at the same time a barrier. Through it nature, the world, the active life beckon, but the artist remains imprisoned, not unpleasantly, in domestic snugness ... This juxtaposition of the very close and the far-away adds a peculiar tension to the sense of distance, more poignant than could be achieved in pure landscape. "Eveything at a distance," wrote Novalis, "turns into poetry: distant mountains, distant people, distant events; all become romantic."'

Eitner's essay was an inspiration for the Met's recent exhibition Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century. According to the exhibition notes, 'Caspar David Friedrich's two sepia drawings of the river Elbe of 1805–6 (View from the Artist's Studio, Window on the Right and View from the Artist's Studio, Window on the Left) inaugurated the Romantic motif of the open window. Unlike the stark balance between the darkened interior and the pale landscape rendered in these views, the artists who followed Friedrich created gentler versions of the motif. Their windows open onto flat plains in Sweden, parks in German spas, or rooftops in Copenhagen. Artists' studios overlook houses in Dresden or Turin, bucolic Vienna suburbs, or Roman cityscapes saturated with light. In several sitting rooms offering urban views of Berlin, the interiors evoke stage sets to satisfy the artist's delightful mania [sic!] with perspective and reflections. ... Even a barren landscape, when framed in a window, can be transformed into an enthralling scene. Some artists recorded actual sites—Copenhagen's harbor, the river Elbe near Dresden, the Bay of Naples—while others invented, or even largely blocked, the views from their studios or painted them in the chill of moonlight.'

Caspar David Friedrich, Woman at a Window, 1822

Source: Wikimedia Commons

One of the paintings referred to by Lorenz Eitner was Friedrich's Woman at a Window, in which the artist's wife looks out at the world beyond the shutters. This painting was in the first of the Met's the four exhibition rooms, dedicated to interiors with figures; the second room displayed images of artists' studios. These suggest another category for an imaginary poetry anthology: domestic scenes in which the window view is just one element. And when you think about it such interior spaces could feature in a whole companion anthology where the position of the observer is reversed, to be on the outside, looking in. As Charles Baudelaire says in his prose poem 'Les Fenêtres', 'Ce qu'on peut voir au soleil est toujours moins intéressant que ce qui se passe derrière une vitre. Dans ce trou noir ou lumineux vit la vit, rêve la vie, souffre la vie. (What we can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what we can perceive taking place behind a pane of windowglass. In that pit, in that blackness or brightness, life is being lived, life is suffering, life is dreaming.... )'

At William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

2011-07-08T16:39:00.004+01:00

One poem I've never managed to persuade my wife to like is James Wright's 'Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota'. Our point of contention is not the twelve lines describing what the poet sees from that hammock: a bronze butterfly asleep on a black trunk, a field of sunlight between two pines, a chicken hawk floating over, looking for home. It is the concluding sentence, 'I have wasted my life.' Now I don't really feel that this is true of myself, but that doesn't mean the thought doesn't occasionally occur, particularly when I'm alone in a landscape. James Wright said to David Smith, 'I think that the poem is a description of a mood and this kind of poem is the kind of poem that has been written for thousands of years by the Chinese poets ... It is not surrealistic. I said, at the end of that poem, "I have wasted my life" because it was what I happened to feel at that moment and as part of the mood I had while lying in the hammock. This poem made English critics angry. I have never understood what would have so infuriated them. They could say the poem was limp or that it did not have enough intellectual content. I can see that. But I hope that it did not pretend to. It just said, I am lying here in this hammock and this and that is happening.'

This poem appeared in Wright's 1963 collection The Branch Will Not Break, named after a line in 'Two Hangovers' in which he emerges from sleep to laugh at a blue jay springing up and down, up and down, on a branch in a pine tree. In 'A Prayer to Escape from the Market Place' Wright says he wants to 'renounce the blindness of magazines' and 'lie down under a tree'. In 'Today I Was Happy So I Made This Poem' he finds solace in the permanence of the moon. 'Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry, I Walk Toward an Unused Pasture and Invite the Insects to Join Me' finds him closing his eyes to listen to the sound of a cricket in the maple trees. And in the anthology favourite 'A Blessing', the sight and feel of two horses in a field just off the highway make him realise 'that if I stepped out of my body I would break / into blossom.' However, that branch can sometimes seem fragile and Wright also describes his darker moods in poems like 'I Was Afraid of Dying', 'In the Cold House' and 'A Dream of Burial'. The book opens with Wright thinking of Po Chü-i, the great Chinese poet 'uneasily entering the gorges of the Yang-tze', and of the tall rocks of Minneapolis building 'my own black twilight.' Where, he asks 'is the sea, that once solved the whole loneliness of the Midwest? Where is Minneapolis? I can see nothing / But the great terrible oak tree darkening with winter.'

Great green reflections in the blue satin of the sea

2011-07-01T11:22:00.002+01:00

John La Farge, Diadem Mountain at Sunset, Tahiti, c1891

Source: Wikimedia Commons

There was an interesting article recently by Christopher Benfey in the New York Review about John La Farge, an American painter also known for his stained glass windows, in which historian Henry Adams detected “infinite shades and refractions of light". In 1890 Adams and La Farge traveled in the South Pacific, first to Hawaii and then to Samoa (where they met Robert Louis Stevenson). There 'the two friends became connoisseurs of the so-called “afterglow,” when sky and surf were irradiated by the setting sun. Under La Farge’s tutelage, Adams became “gently intoxicated on the soft violets and strong blues, the masses of purple and the broad bands of orange and green in the sunsets.” La Farge took notes on the pattern of the waves breaking across a coral reef, then made a superb watercolor based on his observations. The best description of such scenes, at once overwhelming and elusive, comes from his own account, in what the art historian John Stuart Gordon, writing in the catalog, aptly calls a “stained-glass window of words”:

There was all the charm that belongs to the near coasting of land in smooth waters: the rise and fall of the great green reflections in the blue satin of the sea inside of the reef; the sharp blue outside of the white line of reef all iridescent with the breaking of the surf; the patches of coral, white or yellow or purple, wavering below the crystal swell, so transparent as to recall the texture of uncut topaz or amethyst; the shoals of brilliant fish, blue and gold-green, as bright and flickering as tropical hummingbirds; the contrast of great shadows upon the mountain, black with an inkiness that I have never seen elsewhere; the fringes of golden or green palms upon the shores, sometimes inviting, sometimes dreary.'

The catalog referred to above was produced to accompany the exhibition John La Farge's Second Paradise: Voyages in the South Seas, 1890-1891. Yale Art Gallery has a very good site where you can look at John La Farge's South Sea sketch books - the first one, for example, covers Samoa and includes a quick sketch of a view out toward the sea.

A rain-swept valley and two lines of sheep

2011-06-25T17:42:00.000+01:00

I have been watching the DVD of Gideon Koppel's acclaimed film sleep furiously (2009), a remarkably poetic documentary shot over the course of a year around the faming village of Trefeurig in Wales, where the filmaker grew up. Koppel has said 'I wanted to make a film in which moments of intimacy and human gesture became juxtaposed with the infinite space and time of the landscape. I think about the landscape of sleep furiously as an ‘internal landscape’: it has a quality of childhood about it.' The film has the soft light and muted colours of childhood memories (rather like Tarkovsky's polaroids). At the end of the BBC interview below Koppel explains his preference for using film because it can evoke a world, like paint. A landscape on a big screen shot in HD video "works like a signifier - it says very strongly: 'this is a beautiful landscape', but that's all it does. The same landscape shot on film allows the audience to engage with that image through their imagination."

There may be nothing new in breaking off from scenes of people interacting to show, for a few seconds, a panoramic landscape like a gently moving painting (as in Werner Herzog), or in holding a camera steady while a car makes its way slowly across the screen and into the distance (Kiarostami), but each time Gideon Koppel does this in sleep furiously it seems fresh and original. A practice session for the village choir is intercut with shots of an epic landscape of shadowy hills, drifting clouds and crepuscular rays on a distant sea - it sounds too obvious but the effect is genuinely moving, and the sequence concludes modestly with the choir leader's verdict: "well done... at least we have an end now." John Banville, writing of another landscape in sleep furiously, says 'one of the most beautiful and mysteriously affecting sequences is shot from a high mountainside down into a rain-swept valley into which two lines of sheep straggle slowly from different directions to form a kind of ragged magic square. It is the inexplicable beauty of these images that one remembers long after the screen has gone dark.'

The world is blue at its edges and in its depths

2011-06-24T13:13:00.004+01:00

'The world is blue at its edges and in its depths,' writes Rebecca Solnit in A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Blue is 'the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and desire, the colour of there seen from here, the colour of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.'

Solnit goes on to describe the blue distances of Renaissance paintings - the hills in Solario's Crucifixion (1503), for instance, or in the right hand panel of Memling's Resurrection (c1490). I was gazing into one such painting by Jacopo del Sellaio last Saturday at the National Gallery of Scotland when my reverie was broken by the announcement that the room was closing for an hour, due to staff shortages. (I just found the painting online - reproduced below - but failed to note down any information on it as I was hurried out of the gallery, and there is no information on the website). I felt like offering to sit in for the attendant so as to look undisturbed at the painting while he had his lunch, but I could see that in the National Gallery of Scotland all male staff must wear tartan trousers.

Jacopo del Sellaio, St Jerome in the Wilderness

with Saints John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene

In Sellaio's painting the eye follows a succession of mountains set further and further into the distance where sky and sea merge. These mountains resemble waves of rock, emanating from beyond the horizon. They look as if they could form an infinite series - every time you reached one, another peak would be visible further on and, as Rebecca Solnit says, you could never actually reach that blue at the world's edge.

To stare out to sea may be to overlook what is happening in the foreground, and here there is a stark reminder of this in the crucified Christ. And yet this figure, which entirely fills St Jerome's attention, exists only in his mind's eye... There is much to look at in Sellaio's figures of the Saints, their rocky backdrops in three contrasting types of stone, the curiously transparent stream flowing around their feet, and the stylised, perfectly shaped trees behind them. But in the end my eye gets drawn back to that mountain range, receding into the distant blue.

To repeat the forest

2011-06-10T11:31:00.004+01:00

Richard Long and Giuseppe Penone both came to prominence in the late sixties making art in the landscape, and their most recent work is currently being shown together at Haunch of Venison in London. I went along last week keen to see Long's new work but equally interested in Penone, whose installations, sculptures and interventions have involved trees, leaves, rivers, earth and stones. I remember really liking his Breathing the Shadow - a room lined with fragrant laurel leaves containg a small gilt bronze lung - which we saw in 2000 in the old Tour de la Gache of the Palais Des Papes in Avignon. This new exhibition is full of trees and starts with To repeat the forest - fragment 28, part of a series Penone has been making since 1969 where the trees hidden inside mass-produced lumber are liberated by carving away the pulp to reveal 'the way the tree rose into the sky, from which side it absorbed the southern light, whether it was born in a crowded forest, in a meadow or at the edge of a wood.' Several works connect the skin of a tree to the touch of the artist - a wall drawing where rings propogate out from a finger print and photographs of like It Will Continue to Grow Except at This Point (1968-78) where a tree has been growing round a cast of the artist's hand. One room is shared between Long and Penone - a stone spiral and a block of wood. 'Here Penone has chosen to show a wood work in which he has carved into the block following the rings of growth. Long's sculpture in river stones is a spiral which echoes the expanding rings.'

The Richard Long exhibition is called 'Human Nature' and in addition to the expected text pieces, photographs and floor sculptures it includes a small room with objects that hint at the peopled landscape generally missing from his work - North African tent pegs, scrap metal from Niger and driftwood from the river Avon. The final room includes a huge mud work called Human Nature (2011) which has a 'human' side made from clay with a Chinese blue pigment and a 'natural' side where Long has used a red clay from Vallauris in France. Moor Moon (2009) is also a work in two parts, a 39 mile walk 'from one metaphor to another', pairing landmarks on Dartmoor with landmarks on the moon. I have listed the locations below as I think they each have their own poetry. There is something poignant in the way an airless grey plain of basaltic lava on the moon has been named Sinus Iridium, the bay of rainbows. Here it is matched with Raybarrow Pool, described on Dartmoor Walks as a dangerous mire, 'an enclosed and isolated place'.

Visualising Richard Long striding through the landscape I could't help having the rather banal thought that all the walking has certianly kept him fit. Fibonacci Walk, Somerset (2009) is a text work recording 'continuous walks on consecutive days' in 2009. These increased in length according to the Fibonacci number sequence: 1 mile, 1 mile, 2 miles, 3 miles, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89. 89 miles? So he walked 89 miles in one day? After walking 55 miles the previous day? Maybe it just seems extraordinary because I spend my days walking something more like a Kolakoski number sequence (1 mile, 2 miles, 2 miles, 1 mile...) Long now has a lengthy backcatalogue of walks that he can return to, re-trace and reinterpret. Two Continuous Walks Following the Same Line, England (2011) for example matches a straight walk northward across Dartmoor with another straight walk northward in 1979. Not much seems to have changed - a pair of buzzards, dead sheep, gorse, ponies... some larksong this time, foxes last time. You could probably write a whole article on the different ways in which land artists have returned to those places they once made into artworks (for another example see the Simon English project I described last year). Giuseppe Penone too has gone back to the woods in order to photograph the trees he first came upon back in the early Arte Povera days; at Haunch of Venison, It will continue to grow except at this point - radiography (2010) shows the trace of the young artist's hand on a tree, in the form of a ghostly x-ray.

The Morning Glory

2011-06-08T22:15:00.004+01:00

If I hadn't been so busy at work I might have tried to get to the Aubin & Wills Literary Salon this evening, where Travis Elborough was talking about his seaside book Wish You Were Here and Gavin Pretor-Pinney was due to discuss The Wavewatchers' Companion. Never mind - I was actually at the seaside watching the waves last week, and although I've not yet got round to either of these books, I did have Gavin Pretor-Pinney's earlier bestseller The Cloudspotter's Guide with me. You can read various reviews and articles online that tell the story of The Cloud Appreciation Society, which Pretor-Pinney founded in 2004, and the writing and design of The Cloudspotter's Guide, rejected by 28 publishers before becoming a runaway bestseller. The book is not a cultural history, although there are references to clouds in the work of Mantegna and Correggio, Kalidasa and Thoreau. Keen not to be seen as too highbrow, the author describes himself wondering through the Tate's American Sublime exhibition with the catalogue upside down (his point being that the skyscapes in Bierstadt and Church are as important as the landscapes). His sense of humour did grow on me - it is hard to resist the comparison of strato-cumulus, 'always in transition', with 'the pop singer Cher at the height of her costume-changing stage routines'. One species of this cloud, the Morning Glory, is likened to Cher 'in the brass armour bikini and gold Viking helmet she wore on the sleeve of her 1979 album Take Me Home'. This is a long way from Hubert Damisch and A Theory of /Cloud/, I thought, as I read this, but then Damisch was interested in the painted signifier, Pretor-Pinney in explaining and celebrating the real thing.

Altocumulus stratiformus translucidus I believe
(but feel free to correct me if I've got it wrong...)

The Cloudspotter's Guide includes a brief description of the Cloud Harp, an instrument designed by Nicolas Reeves that responds to the shape of the clouds above it (see video clip below), and in the chapter on stratus there is an account of the Blur Building, designed by Liz Diller and Ric Scofidio for the 2002 Swiss Expo, which took the form of a cloud floating on the surface of Lake Neuchâtel. The design for this consisted of a metal skeleton covered with 31,400 high-pressure water jets controlled by computer which took account of temperature, humidity and prevailing winds. 'By responding dynamically to the constant changing atmospheric conditions, the system ensured there was always enough fog to envelop the structure, but not so much as to cause a nuisance downwind.' Artificial clouds and the manipulation of weather for military ends are the depressing subject of the book's penultimate chapter. A 1996 report for the US government, Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025, describes a future in which an enemy can be hit with fog, rain, storms and lightning, and where clouds are controlled through nanotechnology and are able to communicate with each other. After this it is a relief to turn to the final chapter, where Gavin Pretor-Pinney travels to a small town near the Gulf of Carpentaria in search of the Morning Glory (the cloud he likened to Cher in her brass bikini). There he meets the glider pilots who surf this magnificent roll of cloud as it heads inland, and is taken up himself to see the morning sun cascading 'down the cloud's face, casting long shadows along the ripples of its surface. The undulations gently rose up with the progress of the wave, before disappearing over the crest.'

The Cloud Harp

Animated Landscapes

2011-05-29T17:35:00.000+01:00

After the aesthetic pleasures of Barcelona's victory against Manchester United last night it seemed fitting to head down this morning to Tate Modern for the Joan Miró exhibition. The first room is particularly interesting from a landscape perspective, was the artist's signature style can be seen developing through a series of increasingly abstract and surreal views of the Catalan countryside. Before moving to Paris Miró had painted in a cubist-naive style scenes around his family home in the Tarragona mountains. Vegetable Garden and Donkey (1918), for example, has a strange sky that looks like a set of painted walls and a vegetable patch patterned like a carpet. After arriving in Paris in 1920, he spent nine months painting The Farm from memory, a work later bought by Ernest Hemingway, who said ‘it has in it all that you feel about Spain when you are there and all that you feel when you are away and cannot go there. No one else has been able to paint these two very opposing things.’ According to the Tate blog, Miró 'boxed with Hemingway as well as having him to stay at Mont-roig, the place outside Tarragona depicted in astonishing detail in The Farm. Miró told a journalist in 1928, ‘The Farm was a résumé of my entire life in the country.’'

By 1923-4 Miró's forms were becoming freely floating signs and in The Catalan Landscape (The Hunter) the land is reduced to an undulating orange plane. Sea and sky are delineated by no more than a thin line ruled over the yellow background. Wave forms and gull shapes are among the most recognisable symbols; elsewhere, according to the artist, there are such details as "the Toulouse-Rabat airplane on the left; it used to fly past our house once a week. In the painting I showed it by a propellor, a ladder and the French and Catalan flags. You can see the Paris-Barcelona axis again, and the ladder, which fascinated me. A sea and one boat in the distance, and in the very foreground, a sardine with tail and whiskers gobbling up a fly. A broiler waiting for the rabbit, flames and a pimento on the right..."

After a couple more years of accelerated artistic development Miró painted a sequence of 'Animated Landscapes'. In Dog Barking at the Moon (1926), the ladder that had been propped against the wall of The Farm and drifting in the sky in The Catalan Landscape (The Hunter), can now be seen dominating the left had side of the picture, climbing up into the night sky. The Tate's exhibition is actually called 'The Ladder of Escape', after a 1940 painting, one of his celebrated Constellations, which were begun during the blackouts in Normandy and completed after his flight from occupied France to Spain. By this stage Miró was painting a purely inner landscape. The Constellations are probably the exhibition's highlight, although I was pleased to see again the 1968 triptych Painting on White Background for the Cell of a Recluse (usually hung in Barcelona at the Joan Miró Foundation). As Adrian Searle says in his review, 'there's nothing much to the three white canvases. No colour, no forms. Each enormous canvas is painted with a single black line over an unevenly primed white ground. You can tell where the slender brush has run out of paint, is recharged, then continues on its way with the same unknowable purpose, like the passage of an ant or a bird in flight, or the journey the eye makes along a horizon.'

The Mountain That Had to Be Painted

2011-05-21T10:46:00.002+01:00

Contemporary artist Iwan Gwyn Parry tackling Arenig in
'The Mountain That Had to Be Painted'

This week I've been unable to do more than collapse in front of the TV after long days at work, so I have appreciated the fact that BBC4 has been showing a Landscape Season. There has been a lot of outdoor stuff - lakes (Wainwright), mountains (Munro), the golden age of canals and even a documentary on the A303 ('Highway to the Sun'). They repeated Alice Roberts 'titillating middle-aged men' (according to The Guardian) with her wild swimming, and in 'The Great Outdoors' they took 'a nostalgic look at life for campers, twitchers, ramblers and metal detectors'. I missed the programme on R. S. Thomas (on too late...) but caught another one set in the Welsh landscape, 'The Mountain That Had to Be Painted'. This was an account of the time Augustus John and James Dickson Innes spent in the Arenig Valley painting 'a body of work to rival the visionary landscapes of Matisse.' Whilst it did little to dispel the impression that Auguston John's life is more interesting than his art, the programme provided a valuable introduction to the work of Innes, who died (like some old country singer) at the age of 27 from a mixture of TB and wreckless living. For more on Innes and the Arenig school, see a recent post on the Footless Crow mountain writing blog.

Earlier in the week there was an hour-and-a-half long history of English landscape painting, 'This Green and Pleasant Land.' The programme discussed a sequence of paintings from the time of Charles I (Rubens and Van Dyck) down to World War Two (Paul Nash and the patriotic posters of Frank Newbould), with a final leap forward to David Hockney's recent iPhone sketches. As it started we wondered who the extraordinarily plummy-voiced narrator was - Brian Sewell my wife thought, but it turned out to be Simon Callow. Fearing a rather conservative survey we nevertheless ended up enjoying the eclectic mixture of people they had invited to talk about each painting - from the 'editor at large' of Country Life, who suggested that Gainsborough's Mr and Mrs Andrews could easily be imagined in his magazine today, dressed in Barbour jackets and Hunter wellies, to a foundry manager who said he had a reproduction of Coalbrookdale by Night hanging up at home in the hallway. It was worth enduring Peter York explaining his fascination for Atkinson Grimshaw in order to see John Virtue discussing Constable and sketching the sea. Will Self was on amusing form recalling the horror of growing up, as the son of a theoretician of garden suburbs, while actually living in a garden suburb ("that'll do things to a child!"). The programme generally covered the key works you would expect, although I was surprised they missed out Samuel Palmer and spent so much time on Stubbs (who I see I've never mentioned here). All in all, well worth watching if you have access to the BBC iPlayer - available for 6 more days as I write this...

Will Self discusses William Ratcliffe's

Hampstead Garden Suburb from Willifield Way (c. 1914)

Tortoise above the Venetian lagoon

2011-05-15T17:11:00.001+01:00

A year ago in the LRB Marina Warner wrote a fascinating review of Erik Fischer's monumental four-volume catalogue devoted to the work of Melchior Lorck. Born in Danish-controlled Schleswig-Holstein in 1526 or 1527, he trained as a goldsmith but produced maps, medals, heraldry, portraits and landscape drawings. Lorck travelled to Italy and then, in 1555, following in the footsteps of Gentile Bellini, to the Turkey of Suleiman the Magnificent in the company of humanist scholar Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq. Before leaving he produced the drawing below in which 'a large tortoise is placed on the sheet as if paddling through the air above the Venetian lagoon. Lorck added the sly inscription, ‘Made in Venice from Life’, as if daring the viewer to see the colossal creature flying overhead, a reptilian version of the Rukh, the huge raptor from The Arabian Nights who lifts Sinbad, but is also capable of carrying off an elephant.'

Melchior Lorck, Tortoise above the Venetian Lagoon, 1555

Arriving in Constantinople, Lorck sketched the view from his window (rather like the wall in Naples painted by Thomas Jones). Marina Warner quotes Busbecq as saying that the view was blocked by bars and parapets, 'in deference to the complaints of the neighbours, who declared that they had no privacy from the gaze of the Christians. Lorck was probably trying to overcome these constraints when he looked out of the window, or perhaps his curiosity was aroused by them, because, in spite of all the attempts to prevent the gaze of Christians, he captures a tiny vignette of a couple making love on a terrace screened by rushes.' This drawing wasn't in the LRB article but is readily available on Wikimedia Commons - see below. Warner says that 'if I hadn’t gone to Copenhagen to look at Lorck’s work, I wouldn’t have noticed these figures, squirming like a sea anemone' (a simile that reminded me of Sebald's couple resembling 'some great mollusc washed ashore' in The Rings of Saturn). 'Lorck,' she says, 'doesn’t draw attention to the lovers’ presence in his roofscape, he doesn’t show or refer to erotic couplings from the Renaissance repertory. He simply sets down what he saw. His sepia ink records one tile as being as interesting as the next, in the manner of a surveyor measuring and recording. This mode was very radical for its time, and it would be hard to date the work accurately without further context. Apart from Rembrandt’s tender intimacies – and occasional frank scatology – I can’t think of another artist who makes so little fuss about looking at sex.'

Melchior Lorck, View over the rooftops of Constantinople, 1555

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Lorck stayed in Constantinople until 1559 and in that year drew a vast panorama of the city from the heights of the fortifications in Galata, overlooking the Golden Horn. 'In the foreground Lorck shows himself at work; the scroll and a chalice for his ink and paint – there are washes of green and pink on the drawing – are being held for him by a seated Ottoman grandee who is wearing the huge rolled turban that marked a mufti or emir, both important definers and upholders of the law. ... The visiting artist is able to record the city, its layout, its dwellings, its fortifications, its trade and shipping, but only because he has been given permission, and that permission was granted because the Ottoman Empire has nothing to fear from being revealed to foreigners, so confident are its citizens, the official proclaims, in what they have achieved and what they are. So The Prospect is triple-faced: an act of intelligence-gathering by a visitor from a hostile power, a reverent homage to a munificent and enthralling country, and a message to the neighbouring European empire about what it has to reckon with.'

Beyond Twelve Nautical Miles

2011-05-13T18:05:00.003+01:00

Two photographs in magazines I’ve been reading this month caught my eye. The first, from Tate etc. (Summer 2011) is Magritte’s Les Idées Claires (1955), an image chosen by Jeff Koons (who likens the boulder floating over the sea to one of his basketballs in water). The second, from The Wire (May 2011) is Herbert Distel’s Projekt Canaris (1970), showing a three metre long polyester egg which the artist launched from the coast of West Africa. A similar piece is referred to in David Clarke’s recent book Water and Art – in Beyond Twelve Nautical Miles (2000) Zhan Wang set one of his stainless steel rocks adrift at sea near Lingshan Island. And I have written here before about David Nash’s Wooden Boulder, which began as a sculpture in the landscape but after describing the course of a river ended up as another of these art boulders, set free on the sea. As far as I know the current location of Wooden Boulder remains a mystery. Distel’s egg was driven by trade winds across the Atlantic and reached Trinidad seven months later.

I wonder why there hasn’t been more ‘sea art’, floating equivalents to the famous land art projects of the American West? Tacita Dean may have had trouble ‘Trying to Find Spiral Jetty’ (1997) but tracking down a sculpture in an ocean could have been even more interesting. Herbert Distel sought help from the Cuban authorities in locating his egg after it sailed beyond the Canary Islands and was thought to be heading into the Caribbean. It was eventually spotted by the captain of a Dutch ship who sent a telegram: ‘Egg seen on 6 December 1970 gmt 17.50, about 100 km east off the island of Trinidad.’ Of course I’m not really advocating that we litter the sea with permanent floating art works. Instead sea artists might take inspiration from Buster Simpson, who has an ongoing project to drop disks of limestone into the Hudson River: rocks that will gradually dissolve and counteract the effects of acid rain.

The Englishman's Home

2011-05-09T22:05:00.001+01:00

Garden on the roof of Queen Elizabeth Hall

To the South Bank Centre yesterday where the sixtieth anniversary of The Festival of Britain is commemorated in themed areas 'filled with pop-up structures, artworks, films and exhibitions. Each of these ‘lands’ is themed according to one of the most significant themes in 1951: Land, Power & Production, Seaside and People of Britain.' These additions may not do much for the architecture of the site but they are clearly going to be popular with visitors and add to the vibrancy you always sense there in summer. We had a drink in the garden installed on the roof of the Queen Elizabeth Hall which features 'a lush lawn sprinkled with daisies and fruit trees that conjure up a country orchard. With over 90 varieties, the wildflower area is a celebration of the diversity of British flora, attracting insects and butterflies while providing nectar for bees from the hives on Royal Festival Hall’s roof. The garden has a patchwork of vegetable plots – a roof, after all, can be both productive and attractive. And a rustic pergola, clothed with sweetscented climbers, crowns a bridge to the Hayward Gallery punctuated with drought-resistant plants.'

John Piper's mural for the Festival of Britain,

The Englishman's Home, 1951

Inside the QEH you can see the mural John Piper created for the Festival, comprising 42 separate panels with English buildings that he particularly loved. The Englishman's Home was later installed on the wall of Harlow Technical College's main assembly room, where it remained until the college re-located in 1992. According to Frances Spurling's recent book on him, Piper was assisted in painting the mural by Joy Mills, who Myfanwy later described as "one of John's girls" and who was 'aware that John found her very attractive, and that Myfanwy knew this.' Also around the QEH there are other 'Land' installations - a giant Urban Fox, Ben Kelly’s walled Enclosure, and a coal chamber, Black Pig Lodge, by Heather and Ivan Morison (which was roped off for repairs). Apparently you can also hear 'a collage of sounds taken from across Britain’s landscape through the seasons', which 'reverberates across the incongruous setting of Southbank Centre’s concrete terraces and walkways. Using an array of speakers and audio tracks, Marcus Coates and Geoff Sample have recreated the acoustic atmospheres of rural Britain.' I couldn't actually hear anything but possibly didn't locate the correct place to stand - the installations are around until September so no doubt I'll be back at some point.

Landscape with a Natural Arch and Waterfall

2011-05-06T11:48:00.001+01:00

Claude Lorrain, Perseus and the Discovery of Coral, c1671

(preparatory drawing for the Holkham Hall painting,
Metropolitan Museum of Art)

In Helen Langdon's catalogue for last year's Salvator Rosa exhibition she refers in her notes on his painting Landscape with a Natural Arch and Waterfall to the art history of a specific landform, the rocky arch. These were painted more frequently after 1626, when an ancient Roman landscape painting with a rocky arch was discovered in a nymphaeum near the Barberini palace. It was a favourite motif of Rosa's - either inland, as in the Detroit Finding of Moses, or by the sea, as in the Doria Pamphilj's Coastal Scene. In the Palazzo Pitti's Landscape with a Bridge the form of the rocky arch is echoed below by the arches of a crumbling bridge. Peering at small online images of picturesque landscapes, as I have just been doing, it is sometimes hard to distinguish ruined architecture from natural rock formations. Both feature in the work of Northern artists working in Italy in the seventeenth century, like Paul Bril and Jan Breughel I. Rosa was probably influenced by his fellow Neapolitan, Filippo Napoletano, who included the rocky arch in his frescoes for the Palazzo Rospigliosi Pallavicini, and by Claude Lorrain who 'worked numerous variations on it.' It would be fascinating to write a proper history of rock arches in art, covering these imaginary scenes and later works where artists sought to paint or photgraph real examples, like the cliffs at Etretat. We have recently had cultural histories of mountains, forests etc. and now I think it is time to focus on particular geographical features...

Gustave Courbet, La falaise d'Étretat après l'orage, 1870
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The region appeared to be smiling

2011-05-01T16:13:00.003+01:00

Robert Walser's novel The Assistant (1908) opens on a spring morning as Joseph Marti knocks on the door of a lakeside villa owned by his new employer, the inventor Carl Tobler, and ends the following winter with his departure, leaving Tobler's family mired in debt and contemplating the inevitable sale of their property. In the afterword to her translation Susan Bernofsky says that the book's last paragraph was trimmed before publication, but that the original ending encapsulates 'the mood of the book's final pages in a poignant vignette in which the landscape that has been granted such powers of expression throughout the novel appears as lost in thought as its observer.' Joseph looks back at the house one more time, 'silent in wintry isolation ... The landscape appeared to have eyes, and it appeared to be closing them, filled utterly with peace, in order to reflect. Yes, everything appeared a bit pensive. All the surrounding colors appeared to be gently and sweetly dreaming.'

Image from A Journey Round My Skull

The landscape's 'powers of expression' are evident almost every time Joseph leaves the workshop and experiences the natural beauty around him. These exaggerated examples of the pathetic fallacy read as the imaginative projections of a lonely young man, unsure of his place in this world and witnessing the hopes of his employer sinking into inevitable failure. 'Yes, you tell yourself, colors like this produce warmth! The region appeared to be smiling, the sky seemed to have been made happy by its own appearance, it appeared to be the scent and substance and the dear meaning of this smiling of land and lake. How all these things could just lie there, radiant and still. If you gazed out over the surface of the lake, you felt - and you didn't even have to be an assistant for this - as if you were being addressed with friendly, agreeable words.'

Joseph stays on at the villa despite not receiving his salary, unable to bring himself to leave. But, he reflects, nature itself never really changes - lakes do not suddenly transform themselves into clouds. 'A wintry image could superimpose itself upon the world of summer; winter could give way to spring, but the face of the earth remained the same. It put on masks and took them off again, it wrinkled and cleared its huge beautiful brow, it smiled or looked angry, but remained always the same. It was a great lover of make-up, it painted its face now more brightly, now in paler hues, now it was glowing, now pallid, never quite what it had been before, constantly it was changing a little, and yet remained always vividly and restlessly the same. It sent lightning bolts flashing from its eyes and rumbled the thunder with its powerful lungs, it wept the rain down in streams and let the clean, glittering snow come smiling from its lips, but in the features and lineaments of its face, little change could be discerned.'

As time passes and autumn turns to winter Joseph still sees nature in benevolent terms, as the countryside 'peacefully and languorously allowed itself to be covered with thickly falling snow, calmly holding out, as it were, its large, broad, old and wide hand to catch everything.' The last day of the year is unseasonably sunny, reminding him of the time in May when he first arrived at the villa. The weather 'simultaneously calmed and agitated him', but as evening comes - the last evening he will spend there with the Toblers - Joseph, in 'an almost holy mood' goes for a walk. 'The entire landscape appeared to him to be praying, so invitingly, with all its faint, muted earthen hues. The green of the meadows was smiling out from beneath the snow, which the sun had broken into white islands and patches'.

Top Withens

2011-04-30T16:07:00.004+01:00

OK third time lucky. I've written this post twice now and both times it's been deleted - I don't know if other blogspot users are having the same difficulties (basically just as you're editing something it wipes a whole paragraph or, the first time it happened, the whole post, and then instantly saves it so you cannot recover the earlier version). Anyway, what I've been trying to write something about is Bill Brandt’s Literary Britain (1951), a collection of photographs he had taken of the places associated with British writers from Chaucer to Lawrence. The montage below gives you an idea of the book’s layout (without reproducing directly the actual photographs) and shows Brandt’s elemental landscapes: George Crabbe’s Aldeburgh, Thomas Hardy’s Egdon Heath, William Langland’s Malvern Hills, where Piers the Plowman went to rest ‘under a brode banke bi a bornes side.’ But this is a little misleading because many of Brandt’s images are writers’ homes – after Richard Jefferies’ Marlborough Downs, for example, you turn to the birthplace of Samuel Johnson and it is tempting to move swiftly on to the next page, illustrating Johnson’s journey to the Western Isles of Scotland with the desolate moorland on Skye where Sir James Macdonald tried in vain to plant a forest, ‘expecting, doubtless, that they would grow up into future navies and cities,’ but resulting only in a ‘useless heath.’

The next photograph after that is another house: Wentworth Place, where John Keats live. We visited it on a sunny Spring day last year but in Brandt’s photograph all is dark, except for one partially open window - Keats's room. The accompanying text quotes a letter to Fanny - 'come round to my window for a moment when you have read this' - and lines from 'Ode to Psyche': 'A bright torch, and a casement ope at night, To let the warm love in.' Looking at this I started to feel that the photographs of houses were just as interesting as the landscapes in their own way. Turning back to the image of Johnson's house, you see the same aesthetic of simplified forms and strong shadows that Brandt uses in his landscapes, and notice details that start to seem suggestive of the writer - a sturdy white structure with three classical pillars but an asymmetric roof and a set of windows with small rectangular panes that resemble rows of books.

In Romantic Moderns Alexandra Harris writes about the pains Brandt took to get just the right conditions, travelling with heavy equipment and waiting for the perfect weather conditions. ‘Reclaiming the pathetic fallacy, he ensured that each writer got the weather he deserved … Literary Britain is a catalogue of English weather: D. H. Lawrence’s Eastwood terrace is slushy with half-thawed snow, menacing clouds hang suspended over Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, and an ecstatically illuminated mist fills Anthony Trollope’s cathedral.’ The last image of the six above is Top Withens, the supposed location of Wuthering Heights, which Brandt first tried to capture in 1944. “I went to the West Riding in summer, but there were tourists and it seemed quite the wrong time of year. I liked it better misty, rainy, and lonely in November. But I was not satisfied until I saw it again in February. I took the picture just after a hailstorm when a high wind was blowing over the moors.” And yet even this was insufficient, so Brandt superimposed a sky from a different photograph, ‘over-exposing both negatives so that the moorland earth became impenetrably black, pitted with the spectral white of the settled hailstones.’

Sonorous stones

2011-04-23T06:00:00.003+01:00

In one of my earliest posts here I talked about the wide range of landscapes on show at the Royal Academy's 2005 exhibition China: The Three Emperors, but I didn't mention one of the most memorable exhibits, dating from 1764: a set of sixteen sonorous stones, hung from a gold-lacquered frame three and a half metres high. According to the catalogue 'sonorous stones made of dark green nephrite, such as those in this chime, were reserved for Grand Sacrifices performed at the Altar of Heaven and the Altar of Land and Grain, whereas the sonorous stones used in other state rites were made of limestone.' Examples of these stone chimes (bianqing) exist going back thousands of years - the earliest were made of marble. Similar instruments have been constructed in many different countries: rock gongs in Kenya, stone church bells in Ethiopia, castanets made of basaltic lava in Hawaii and the rarely heard Mongolian lithophone known as the shuluun tsargel. In England a rock harmonicon, built by the Richardson family, was played in front of Queen Victoria in 1848 and she was apparently so impressed she requested two further performances. A photograph of Neddy Dick with his rock instrument features in Rob Young's Electric Eden (see my previous post) and it can be seen on Mike Adcock's excellent Lithophones.com website, which I am drawing on here.

From a landscape perspective, I am particularly interested in the way certain locations provide particularly musical rocks. This was the case in England, where 'in the eighteenth century rocks found on the river bed in Skiddaw in the Lake District were found to possess a particularly sonorous quality. Peter Crosthwaite, who had opened his own museum in Keswick assembled a set of musical stones in 1785, some of which were already in perfect tune, the rest he tuned himself by chipping away at the stone. In the years following a number of people began to make musical instruments using the stone, known as hornfels or spotted schist, meticulously tuning them by cutting them into different length slabs and laying them horizontally.' One of these was the Richardsons' rock harmonicon and another was commissioned by John Ruskin (visitors to the Ruskin Museum are invited to try it out for themselves).

Carl Orff used a lithophone in his opera Antigonae (1949) and Lithophones.com lists many contemporary sound artists and musicians who have made use of stone - from Sigur Rós to Stephan Micus (see clip below). There are also examples of stone instruments being made and sited in the landscape as musical sculptures, like Paul Fuchs' Garden of Sound in the Italian village of Boccheggiano. Lithophones have been constructed using agate, marble, basalt and sonorous stones “gathered from the shores of Lake Superior”. Terje Isungset, who recently played his ice instruments here in London,has also performed on blocks of Norwegian granite. It would be good to know more about performances using stone that have taken place outside, like John Luther Adams' Inuksuit which I discussed here previously (there is a Youtube clip where you can see stones being rubbed together). And it would also be nice to know more about cases where rock forms have been played directly in situ - an ancient practice, as evinced by the marks of use on stalactites found near prehistoric cave paintings in the Dordogne. However, on his website Mike Adcock points out that 'in many parts of the world there is sometimes a reticence about talking about ringing stones, possibly because of their sacred quality, and even their whereabouts remains a local secret.'

Electric Eden

2011-04-22T12:51:00.000+01:00

Britain's rural landscape is a constant presence in Rob Young's exploration of visionary folk music, Electric Eden. His prologue follows Vashti Bunyan as she sets out from London in 1968 on the road to Skye, where Donovan was hoping to set up a 'Renaissance Community' of artists (it was the same year that Paul McCartney introduced Linda Eastman to his farm on the Kintyre peninsula). At the same time groups like the Incredible String Band and Fairport Convention were retreating to cottages and developing psychedelic folk music with a shifting cast of like-minded musicians and artists. Some of this is familiar history, like the recording of Liege and Lief at Farley Chamberlayne, where Fairport Convention reinvigorated songs from the archives of the English Folk Dance and Song Society whilst recovering from the M1 crash that killed Richard Thomspon's girlfriend and drummer Martin Lamble. But Young also discusses forgotten groups like Heron, who went to seek inspiration in rural seclusion for their two albums at a farmhouse in Berkshire and a cottage in Devon. Their lyrics are infused with what Rob Young describes as a 'Wordworthian hippy mood'; 'Lord and Master' for example, 'a reverie sung by a pantheistic nature-god whose being is entwined with the seasonal cycles he describes: 'I am the maker of everything and I soar with the birds in the sky'.'

I have described two examples here recently of recordings made en plein air - Richard Skelton's Landings and Movietone's The Sand and the Stars - but Heron pursued this approach forty years ago, as can be heard from the birdsong at the end of the clip above. For their first album, the band played their songs outside on a circle of chairs, whilst an additional microphone was set up some distance away to capture the surrounding ambience, as if Nature were a fifth member of the group. For their follow-up, Twice as Nice & Half the Price (1971), a local RAF base commander was persuaded to suspend flights so that the outdoor recording would not be sullied with the sounds of jet fighters. Later in the book Young gives another example of outdoor recording from what he calls 'the final bright bloom in the garden of British folk-rock' - John Martyn's One World (1977). Sitting overlooking the lake on Chris Blackwell's Berkshire estate, Martyn played his guitar through amplifiers floating on the water. 'Time seems arrested; the music is the still centre of a turning world of surging waves and intermittent bird calls.'

Rough Seas

2011-04-13T23:12:00.000+01:00

The Tate's Susan Hiller exhibition begins with Dedicated to the Unknown Artists (1972-76) an installation first shown at the Gardner Centre, Sussex University, when she was artist in residence there (I wonder if I saw it there at the time as I was being taken to one of the pantomimes they used to put on for children). Rachel Withers has described it well: 'several hundred vintage and contemporary "rough sea" postcards: visually seductive views purporting to show gigantic waves bombarding British beaches, piers, and esplanades. The piece marshals these in grid formation, systematically logging details of the cards' locations, captions, and message content ("We had a storm today, just like this one," and so on), and evidencing generations of British natives themselves colluding in the anthropological myth of the "British love affair with lousy weather" ... Its postcard images reiterate the ideologically saturated motif of the Sublime--reason's battle with cosmic chaos. In parallel, the work's King Canute-like "empirical" sorting system threatens to be swamped by the morass of material it strives to tame and contain.'

Fred C. Palmer of Tower Studio, Herne Bay - postcard, 1913

Source: Wikimedia Commons

According to Brian Dillon in Tate Etc. 'something of the same semantic exchange between image, text and unseen history circulates in The J. Street Project (2002–2005): a film, photographic series and wall display which record the 303 thoroughfares (streets, alleyways, modest paths) in Germany that are still named for the Jewish communities that once resided, worked or traded there. “Still named” is not exactly the phrase here, of course, because what Hiller has archived is a series of places that lost their names in the Nazi era and have since had them reinstated ... As Hiller’s film demonstrates, contemporary life carries on around these traumatic inscriptions as though they were not there: the memorial name becomes just another textual element (ignored by passers-by) in the street furniture of the modern city, so that it is entirely unclear if it functions as a means of recall or amnesia.' I sat and watched the film for a while and noticed the way that she classified and ordered the material, just as she had earlier devised a typology of rough sea imagery, except that the sequencing here seemed to be based more on the people passing the camera than the specifics of the view. The section I saw edited together footage of streets being entered by children, giving way to further scenes with old people - the places might have been interchangeable, but in each case the street signs were visible reminders of the contrast between past and present.

The final room of the Susan Hiller exhibition includes Voyage on a Rough Sea: Homage to Marcel Broodthaers from last year - the latest of various various works that have returned to the theme of rough seas. She says she actually met Broodthaers in 1972 at a London exhibition: 'in the pub afterwards I shyly mentioned that I was working with postcards of rough seas, and he told me something about his own postcard projects'. Broodthaers was himself concerned with classification and curation - that year in Düsseldorf he organised a display of eagles 'From the Oligocene to the Present', mixing together valuable sculptures with worthless modern objects like product labels and old champagne bottle corks. His film A Voyage on the North Sea (1974) (below) is often cited as a key work in the history of conceptual art and is explicitly referred to in Hiller's montage of re-coloured postcard images. His work has also inspired Tacita Dean (whose approach often resembles Susan Hiller's) and she paid tribute to him in Section Cinema (Homage to Marcel Broodthaers) (2002). Dean also made two of her large blackboard drawings derived from Broodthaers' film Chère petite soeur (1972), which was itself based on a found postcard from 1901, depicting a boat in a rough sea. Broodthaers used the postcard's message as subtitles, leaving the viewer to wonder (as in Hiller's rough sea installation) why people choose to send these particular postcard images... 'Dear little sister, this is to give you an idea of the storm which we had yesterday. I'll give you more details about it, best wishes and see you soon, Marie.'

Atlasov Island

2011-04-10T16:43:00.001+01:00

I read Judith Schalansky's Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I have not visited and never will last month, but keep flicking back through it and looking at the maps. They are all printed on the same scale and as you can see from the examples above, each island seems to possess a uniquely satisfying shape. Various reviews will give you the background on this book, which won the German Arts Foundation Prize for the Most Beautiful Book of the Year (a version of which it would be good to have here) - there's an excellent piece about it on John Self's blog, for example, and another by Robert Macfarlane in The Guardian. The short prose pieces accompanying each map reminded me, as they have others, of Calvino's Invisible Cities. The island of Tikopia, for instance, has 1,200 inhabitants who believe in zero population growth; then there is Pingelap, where a significant minority are colour blind but insist they can see things hidden from the others, like dark shoals of fish in the moonlit sea; and Takuu, where the old people build dykes to combat rising sea levels and the young spend their time drinking the juice of the coconut palm but, either way, 'Takuu will sink - next month, next year...'

Not all the islands are inhabited though, and one I thought I would highlight in this landscape blog is Atlasov Island, known in Japanese as Araido-tō and 'more beautiful than Mount Fuji.' Apparently haiku have been written in praise of it, but I have not managed to track any down. Schalansky notes that in the early 1950s a 'women's penal colony was set up', but no one lives there now. There is a myth that the mountain was forced to move from its original home in the middle of Lake Kurile on the Kamchatka peninsula, where its perfect beauty made the surrounding peaks jealous. 'So it started out on a long journey, finally settling itself down in a peaceful spot far away in the sea. ... The river Ozernaya flows in the tracks of the mountain's reluctant journey. When the mountain lifted itself from its place, the water of the lake rushed after it. It is a thin blue umbilical cord that will always bind the exiled mountain to its homeland.'

Atlasov island

Source: Wikimedia Commons

High in the gorges a rock dam will rise

2011-04-07T23:18:00.000+01:00

I have been reading about contemporary Chinese artists this week - disturbing news of the detention of Ai Weiwei and an interesting survey of recent art questioning Chinese state power in David Clarke's book Water and Art. Clarke traces the importance of water control schemes in modern China: the Yangtze river bridge at Wuhan linking north and south for the first time, the bridge at Nanjing built in 1968 entirely by Chinese engineers, the South-North Water Transfer Project and most recently The Three Gorges Dam which has flooded a landscape celebrated in Chinese literature. Whilst earlier artists celebrated these achievements (Wei Zixi's The Yangtze River Becomes a Thoroughfare, 1973), recent artists have been freer to depict their human cost (Liu Xiaodong's Three Gorges: Displaced Population, 2003). In 1995, a year after the Three Gorges Dam was given the go-ahead, Zhuang Hui made a series of transitory marks at locations that would soon be submerged, had them photographed and exhibited as Longitude 109.88 E and Latitude 31.09 N. These were among the works in a show in Chicago a couple of years ago called 'Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Chinese Contemporary Art.'

Wang Jin's Fighting the Flood - Red Flag Canal (1994) involved a trip to another famous Mao era water-control project. There the artist released 50kg of red pigment into the water, transforming the colour of communism into an agent of pollution, as well as a memorial to the blood sacrificed by those who built the canal. David Clarke relates this work to Olafur Eliasson's similar Green River works, in which green dye has been poured into various rivers around the world and the artist has waited to observe people's reactions. In an interview Eliasson recounted how in Tokyo 'a lot of people stopped and looked... And of course they were stunned. I did it in a spot where the cherry blossom comes out a month later. It's well known as a beautiful place. Actually the police came and. basically I ran away. And the police then put up posters asking anybody who had seen somebody suspicious to contact them.' Incidentally, both of these river dying projects were preceded by an attempt by Denis Oppenheim and Peter Hutchison in 1969 to paint the irregular shape of Highway 20 onto the waters of a Caribbean cove, using magenta dye and gasoline. Unfortunately the dye seeped ashore, impregnated beach towels and then, through the hotel washing machines, contaminated other laundry so that "everything was pink". Oppneheim said later that he considered the outcome a better work than the one he had originally envisaged.

Some of the contemporary Chinese artists discussed in Water and Art have been producing work that challenges the Chinese cult of swimming, typified by Mao, who developed it into a public spectacle (see clip below). This was not about immersion in nature or a Daoist sense of going with the flow; Mao said that 'swimming is an exercise of struggling with nature', and 'the current going against you can train your will and courage to be stronger.' Mao's swim across the Yangtze in 1956, with its emphasis on the body and endurance, in some ways 'strangely prefigures aspects of Chinese performance art.' An earlier chapter of Clarke's book is devoted to Fu Baoshi, who specialised in rainswept landscapes but also painted On the Theme of Mao Zedong's 'Swimming'. 'Swimming' was the poem Mao wrote after crossing the Yangtze, but its emphasis on the mastery of nature is barely felt in Fu's painting, which seems to show Mao's head marooned in a vast expanse of water. Painted in 1958, this work could not be directly critical but was hardly heroic either. And in adding calligraphy to the painting, Fu chose to ignore those lines in which Mao looked to the future: 'high in the gorges a rock dam will rise, / cutting off Wu Mountain's cloud and rain. / A still lake will climb in the tall gorges.'

Fore-edge painting of the Pont a la Carraca

2011-03-25T10:43:00.003Z

Specimens of the early English poets, 1790, bound by Edwards of Halifax.

Fore-edge painting of the house of Sir Thomas Claverings, Oxwell Park, Northumberland

The Boston Public Library has a most excellent online collection of fore-edge book paintings. Anne C. Bromer's short essay there explains the development of this art form after the sixteenth century, when 'a Venetian artist, Cesare Vecellio, devised a way to enhance the beauty of a book by painting on its edges. The images, mostly portraits, were easily viewed when the covers of the book were closed. A century later in England, Samuel Mearne, a bookbinder to the royal family, developed the art of the “disappearing painting” on the fore-edge of a book. ... In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, fore-edge painting reached its height in England. The famous bookbinding firm, which is always referred to with “the territorial suffix” Edwards of Halifax, was responsible for this surge of interest. Artists were employed to paint landscape scenes with country estates on the fore-edges of books, which were then handsomely bound in painted vellum covers or in exotic leather bindings.'

The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore, 1865

Fore-edge painting of the Pont a la Carraca, Florence

Boston Public Library

The river scene in Florence above is actually one of two landscapes on this edition of Thomas Moore's poems. It is an example of a double fore-edge - when the pages are bent to the right instead of the left, a different scene appears, showing Enniscorthy in Wexford. Sometimes fore-edge landscapes were directly related to the book's contents, like the edition of Oberon below, or William Rae Wilson's Travels in the Holy Land, Egypt &c. &c. (1831), volume 1 of which shows a view of Joppa and volume 2 a view of Corfu. Others seem to have no obvious link - a four volume edition of Homer features views of Eton from the river, Hampton Court Place, Oystermouth Castle and the city of Bath.

Oberon : a poem, from the German of Wieland by William Sotheby, 1798.

Fore-edge painting of a scene from the book - "Go hence to Bagdad'"

I've written here before about our fascination with the 'homes and haunts' of writers, in books like Gilbert Highet's Poets in a Landscape and Edward Thomas's The Literary Pilgrim in England. Looking through the Boston Public Library collection you can see how often fore-edge paintings provided picturesque views of the author's home. Examples include Robert Burns' cottage, Alexander Pope's villa, William Cowper's house at Weston and the childhood home of John Wesley to accompany A collection of Hymns, for the use of the people called Methodists (1825). Mary Brunton, author of Emmeline, was born on the Island of Burray, giving the bookbinders scope for a view of blue-grey mountains and sea. Milton's birthplace in Bread Street, London, may have been harder to idealise, but the school he attended, St Paul's, provided a splendid vista, while other editions of his work featured a view of London Bridge and the cottage at Chalfont St Giles to which he retired during the Great Plague of London.

The falls of Cora Linn

2011-03-24T11:19:00.001Z

The Clyde at New Lanark, March 2011

On Saturday August 20th 1803, Coleridge and the Wordsworths arrived in Lanark. William headed off immediately to look at the celebrated waterfalls, leaving the others to find an inn. Rejecting the Black Bull, whose 'genteel apartments' turned out to be 'the abode of dirt and poverty', they opted for the New Inn, where they sat in the parlour (tables unwiped, floor dirty and the smell of liquor 'most offensive'), grateful for a rest. Dorothy's diary records that 'poor Coleridge was unwell', struggling with withdrawal symptoms, but she set off after William, hoping to meet him by the falls. Evening was drawing in though, and she found that 'the Falls of the Clyde were shut up in a gentleman's grounds, and to be viewed only by means of lock and key'. Next day however, all three were able to see the falls of Cora Linn, where they sat on a bench placed specially for the view. Dorothy was struck with astonishment, 'which died away, giving place to more delightful feelings; though there were some buildings that I could have wished had not been there, though at first unnoticed.'

'A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. 'Yes, sir,' says Coleridge, 'it is a majestic waterfall.' 'Sublime and beautiful,' replied his friend. Poor Coleridge could make no answer, and, not very desirous to continue the conversation, came to us and related the story, laughing heartily.'

Cora Linn Falls

I mentioned in a previous post that 'the 'astounding flood', as William described the falls of Cora Linn, appears less impressive now that hydroelectric power has been introduced to the Clyde.' This is evident in the photograph above which I took on Saturday. The site today is a nature reserve, part of the New Lanark world heritage site, and the sign at Cora Linn explains that the electricity produced there 'is important not only for people, but also for wildlife'. Other notices nearby warn visitors to stick to the path and be aware that the hydroelectric power station can cause water levels in the river to suddenly change. Not that I was planning to have a dip - the walk itself was rewarding enough - and half way between Cora Linn and the falls of Bonnington Linn I stood for a while watching a peregrine falcon (its nesting site well signposted). It is a steep walk back up to Lanark and I had a train to catch back to Glasgow and thence to London. Dorothy Wordsworth and the poets returned for one more night at the New Inn where they 'ate heartily' of a 'true Scottish' dish: 'boiled sheep's head, with the hair singed off.'

Hydroelectric pipes near Cora Linn

Threads Across the River

2011-03-20T21:58:00.002Z

Richard Skelton is interviewed by Clive Bell in the latest issue of The Wire, talking about landscape and loss and photographed on Anglezarke Moor, standing alone by a dry stone wall near a recumbent (dead?) sheep. There is a fascinating discussion of Skelton's music making en plein air, as they walk the moors and visit places that feature on Landings - an album I discussed here in an earlier post. The clip below features 'Scar Tissue', which was 'the result of a single encounter with a particular place', and 'Threads Across the River', 'an accretion of different times and different places ... a weave of sounds recorded in the two ruins which straddle the river Yarrow: Old Rachel's and Simms.'

The interview moves on to talk about ways in which the landscape has permeated Skelton's musical instruments - grasses and leaves intertwined around a fretboard, balsam leaves threaded into the sound hole of a mandola, bits of bark used as plectra. "Because I was using really cheap instruments, I could leave them out in the wood and cover them in leaves. It didn't matter if they got knackered. I was coming to terms with a process of decay." I've written here before about Ross Bolleter's pianos, left exposed in the landscape until 'all the damp and unrequited loves of Schumann, Brahms and Chopin dry out, degrading to a heap of rotten wood and rusting wire'.

The article also touches on a third way in which Skelton makes direct connections with the West Pennine Moors, in addition to exposing his instruments to the elements and recording himself in the wider soundscape (you can hear birdsong at the end of the clip above - 'Pariah', another track from Landings). Discussing Box of Birch, Skelton says he has sometimes tried to play the environment directly: bowing barbed wire and playing trees to get a 'grating, rattling undercurrent'. "The barbed wire stretched across the landscape was like the strings on an instrument" he says, a comment that reminded me of my recent post on the aeolian telephone wires of Australia. I suppose the trouble with attempting to 'play a landscape' is the risk of seeming to possess and use it, rather than amplify its natural sounds. Of course it should be possible to making sounds from a living tree without harming it, and yet I wonder if the clip below (which I came upon via Twitter) would seem less acceptable if it involved a tree located out in some 'wild' location.

Finally, I should return to Richard Skelton and mention his latest release, Wolf Notes, which was 'inspired by the landscape, place-names, flora and fauna of Ulpha, in Cumbria'. There is a useful review at The Liminal which describes Skelton's use of 'the place names, the roots, of Cumbria ... Wolf Notes derives from the etymological root of ‘ulpha’, understood to mean “the hill frequented by wolves,” from the Old Norse ulfr, “wolf”, and haugr, “hill or mound.”' The limited first edition (now sold out) came with a book of poems, a glossary and a 'phial of specially prepared, hand-mixed incense made from birch leaves, yarrow, wild grasses and a selection of resins.'

Wolf Notes by *AR

The storm runs forth on several seas

2011-03-11T17:42:00.000Z

Harriet Tarlo's anthology of radical landscape poetry The Ground Aslant, which I previewed in an earlier post, has now been published. Shearsman have made the book's introduction available to download on their website, so there's no real need for me to summarise its contents. Here instead is an unrepresentative sequence of quotations (copyright prevents the inclusion of whole poems), chosen to provide 'some landscapes' from each of the sixteen poets, starting with the editor:

Black Combe crest

over ridges shale spit line
pale marram dunes (their small sea-bright
trefoils and succulents) ...

- from 'Outcrops at Haverrig', by Harriet Tarlo

...between loss and consolidation
in the hollow of the dune slack

- from the second short poem in Thomas A. Clark's sequence 'The Grey Fold'

                                   ... the new salt marsh
                                       no more freshwater
                                       the salt line
                                       grey grass
                                       bleached trees
                                       byre useless ...

- from the April section of 'Myne' by Frances Presley, on a walk from Greenaleigh to Porlock Bay

   ... I hear mud rustle
                                     ducks come in to land
                                     tide recedes in intensity

                                     blood filled hands
                                     I mean lands
                                     the duck glides
                                     and lands

- from 'lights' by Ian Davidson, whose afterword to his collection At a Stretch worries that 'there may be too much landscape' in his poetry...

                  ... At Kingwater the stream plashes
     kingcups over the green ironbridge, pupae to dust wedges
     and rust coloured reflections of trees in water.
     Flag irises, rhododendrons. Out of focus pine trees, lacking their bitmap,
     alive only in geological time. ...

- from 'The Stars Have Broken in Pieces' in which Nicholas Johnson passes through the landscape of northern England, from Derbyshire to Cumbria

                       through white trees nothing said
                                     the edges grow sharper the hills
                                                     farther away with each degree

- from 'Gwydyr Forest' by Zoë Skoulding

                    ...This is a wood you increase by coming-out-of-it -
                       out into the snow with a sawing motion of it -
bear-lope        muskrat-ramble     badger-trundle            marten-amble...

- from 'Carcajou' by Colin Simms, poet and naturalist who was the subject of an earlier post here

Trees pale in knot but nowhere in cooped flux of them, not-bending swivels a sky foldlessly relenting. Leaning skyward can't suffer on the slant, only drawn off slope by the unholdable intimacy of vertical separation.

- from 'Lean Earth Off Trees Unaslant, 3' by Peter Larkin

... a little light at dusk by which to sit and read the blanched white ash-stems reaching sky
ward the steep woody tangle above the tumbling stream each stem gleams in the January dull ...

- from Wendy Mulford's 'Alltud: 'exile'', part of a description of the Wye valley at Erwood in Powys

                Snow has settled in the lines
                Of an old ridge-and-furrow system
                    Striping the gently sloping dark
                    Green fields, engrossed script
                    Of duration, repetition, authority...

- from 'Prelude' by Peter Riley

               the feeding of one into the landscape results
               in a climbing to infinity this opens the labour of a day
             the task is to find a distribution of fields
               and from these the truth of this place ...

- the first lines of Carol Watts' Zeta Landscape, which the author has described as "lyric nature poetry put under pressure"

      scarp    along Don's arc shall ow hanging
              loops of pow   er-line   pylons   dull silvery
              frames holding   dead space live   to shock oak

                leaves pat drips & drop   rain through fractal
                  cascades...

- from 'Rurban Membrane, A Sheffield Rim, North East' by Mark Goodwin

                                       ... Eyes

                pull on
      contours held in common:
     plough through brick, steel, steads
   under cooling towers, the soils
worn thin for nitrogen ...

- from 'aurals' by Tony Baker, a landscape seen on 'the journey toward Mansfield'

                               ... seductive flowertrails
                                   penetrate the hills where we confront
                                   the ambiguity of wayposts &
                                   clouds that distil a thin
                                   gleet ...

- from 'Lady's Bedstraw (Gallium verum) / Quantocks' by Elisabeth Bletsoe, who, as reported here, I saw at the second Re-Enchantment event last year

The storm runs forth on several seas whose manner is
the hard edge of a clamber down gneiss...

- the opening words of 'Dale' by Helen MacDonald

                                      Ripples take
                                      mackerel from
                                      con-
                                      trail
                                      imbues dew.

                                      Dew jewels more
                                      obviously ground.

                                      no shadow but
                                      wisp-
                                      errs
                                      the arc
                                      amongst crystals
                                      of
                                      ice.

- from the 'High clouds base >20,000 feet' column of a tabular poem, one of a sequence called The Speed of Clouds by Mark Dickinson

The Morning Sea

2011-03-05T21:57:00.000Z

There is a short poem by C. P. Cavafy, 'The Morning Sea' (1915), in which the poet stops and gazes out from the yellow shore on the brilliant blue of the sea. 'Let me stand here. And let me pretend I see all this' he says, but what he actually sees are 'memories, those sensual images.' It is an example of one kind of poetry where the themes of landscape and love intersect: the poet tries to concentrate on the beauty of nature but only sees a reflection of his own feelings. English literature includes the example below, where Sir Philip Sidney concludes that 'infected minds infect each thing they see.' However, I'm sure there must also be poems that work the other way round, where landscape infects desire and strong memories of a place overshadow the sight of a loved one...

In wonted walks, since wonted fancies change,
Some cause there is, which of strange cause doth rise:
For in each thing whereto mine eye doth range,
Part of my pain, me-seems, engraved lies.

The rocks, which were of constant mind the mark,
In climbing steep, now hard refusal show;
The shading woods seem now my sun to dark,
And stately hills disdain to look so low.

The restful caves now restless visions give;
In dales I see each way a hard ascent:
Like late-mown meads, late cut from joy I live;

Alas, sweet brooks do in my tears augment:
Rocks, woods, hills, caves, dales, meads, brooks, answer me;
Infected minds infect each thing they see.

Without Colours

2011-03-04T21:21:00.000Z

The exterior panels of Northern Renaissance altarpieces were sometimes painted in what my computer would call 'grayscale' but what art historians refer to as 'grisaille' (a term invented in the seventeenth century to describe stained glass in different shades of grey). As Susie Nash points out in her book Northern Renaissance Art, these grey panels would also have provided a 'suitably less materially-rich image for Lent and ordinary feast days, and a more durable protective covering, easier to repaint and with no colours to fade.' Typically these would show Biblical figures as if they were statues and would contrast dramatically when opened with the 'real' figures painted inside. No wooden altarpiece could have supported the weight of actual stone sculpture and so painting 'made possible the impossible, and painters developed and complicated the idea further by representing sculpture that would have been near-impossible to carve, or in which there is ambiguity about whether what is represented is a sculpted or living form.' Once artists had developed this practice of painting disconcertingly life-like stone figures, it was not too great a step to replace their sculptural niche with a natural setting - a grisaille landscape.

Jan Gossaert, Saint Jerome Penitent, ca. 1510

The panels above showing Saint Jerome in the wilderness have clearly left the idea of painted sculpture behind - but for the grisaille they are fairly traditional depiction of the story (showing two earlier episodes in the saint's life in the background). In other media, frescoes and illuminated manuscripts were also being produced at this time in monochrome or with deliberately reduced palettes, emphasising form over colour. But looking at this painting on a grisaille winter's day last week, in the National Gallery's new exhibition Jan Gossaert's Renaissance, I was still struck by the scene's uncanny resemblance to a world turned to stone. Perhaps it is because Saint Jerome himself is holding a rock, as he kneels in the rocky landscape with a great stone city in the background, whilst on the other panel, the statue-like figure of Christ is set on a petrified tree beneath an ash-coloured sky.

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights outer wings, c1490-1510

Possibly the best known grisaille outer panels from this period are those of Hieronymus Bosch and those for The Garden of Earthly Delights show the earth as it was on the third day of creation. This is a world before colour, where land is only just emerging from the misty sea under dark rain clouds, and newly formed trees are seen alongside other stranger growths, half-vegetable, half-mineral. Italo Calvino's story 'Without Colours', in Cosmicomics, describes the the beauty of the grey earth before an atmosphere has formed to filter the light of the sun. Here 'trees of smoke-colored lava stretched out twisted branches from which hung thin leaves of slate. Butterflies of ash flying over clay meadows hovered above opaque crystal daises...' Calvino's hero Qfwfq, who yearns for contrast, colour and sound, falls in love with the beautiful Ayl, 'a happy inhabitant of the silence that reigns where all vibration is excluded'. When the world begins to change Ayl takes fright at the disruption to her beloved neutral landscape and they are parted. As Qfwfq looks sadly out on the 'canary-yellow fields which striped the tawny hills sloping down to a sea full of azure glints, all seemed so trivial...' He realises Ayl could never have been happy here among 'those gilded and silvered gleams, those little clouds that turned from blue to pink, those green leaves that yellowed every autumn, and that Ayl's perfect world was lost forever.'

The Brothers Quay, cover for Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics,

a photographic collage grisaille landscape.