Grandi paesaggi

Here I am a few days ago, posing for scale so that you can see how big these 18th century landscape paintings are. They are the work of Giuseppe Zais (1709-84) and were made during a great phase of Veneto landscape art, initiated by Marco Ricci and developed further by Francesco Zucarelli. They now hang in the Eremitani Civic Museum in Padua, next to the Cappella degli Scrovegni, with its extraordinary Giotto frescoes. They were actually made for the Alcove Room of the Mussato Palace, a building in the same city that now serves as a middle school. There they would have decorated the walls like tapestries, or a very superior kind of wallpaper. 

Zais painted his hills, trees and rivers in warm colours and golden light. There are just a few rural figures resting and chatting, rather than doing any strenuous work. Such decorative veduta rarely have anything very unusual about them - their purpose was to offer restful escapism. It is hard to find art historical writing about such work, in contrast to the contemporary topographical views of Venice by Canaletto et al, which are endlessly fascinating for their details of daily life and settings that survive largely unchanged. Despite their scale, these Zais landscapes are almost empty of any meaning. They resemble stage scenery and perhaps certain domestic dramas did play out in front of them during the age of Casanova. I can also imagine some member of the Mussato family staff passing them every day and occasionally taking a moment from their duties to daydream about this entrancing world. 

White-Rock Shallows

Pat Suet-Bik Hui, Painting with Poem by Wang Wei, 1995

This is one of the paintings on show in the Ashmolean at the moment, in a small exhibition called The Three Perfections. 

'Hui has inscribed this painting with a Tang-era (618-907) poem that transforms her seemingly abstract streaks of blue into the image of a flowing river: Clear and shallow rapids formed out of white rocks / Green reeds grasp reaching for the sky / Families dotted along both banks / Silk rustling as it's washed beneath the bright moon.'

The curators don't say, but this is one of Wang Wei's poems from the celebrated Wang River Sequence, which I first mentioned here back in 2006. David Hinton calls it 'White-Rock Shallows'. The poems are not purely landscape description - here we see people by the river washing silk. The second slightly confusing line suggests rushes 'grasping' for the sky. Alternative translations include: 'green rushes once could be grasped', 'green reeds almost near enough to touch'  and (Hinton) 'green reeds past prime for harvest.'

Pat Suet-Bik Hui (b. 1943) gave a set these paintings to the Chinese art expert Michael Sullivan, who bequeathed then to the Ashmolean. In addition to paintings with calligraphy, Hui made images without words; one, called 'Landscape', consists of a blue wash for the sky and a green wash for the land, separated by a lavender horizon. Hui has lived for many years in North America but originally studied in Hong Kong under the traditional ink painter Lui Shou Kwan. They were introduced by another of his pupils, Wucius Wong, who specialises in landscapes set within geometric structures (see, for example, the Met's Reminiscing About the River). The Ashmolean has a painting of his called Autumn Feelings which incorporates two leaves and splashes of red and brown ink. There were trees in Oxford this week that are starting to turn and paint the ground with fallen leaves.  

A glorious sunburst-streak

The Wire magazine, which I referenced yesterday, has just put out its 500th issue. I started reading it in 1987 when I was a student, buying my first jazz LPs and looking for information about the history of the music. Over the years, the magazine has broadened its scope and covered a lot of landscape-related sounds. I have often drawn on it in writing Some Landscapes. Perhaps the most influential article for my developing interest in this area was Phil England's survey of Acoustic Ecology in December 2002 - I referred to this excellent article in a 2007 blog post. The Wire archive has become an extraordinary resource and you can spend hours hunting through it for references to landscape - as inspiration for music, or the setting for concerts, or just as a source of metaphors for the way a song or a jazz solo sounds. You can also search for references to actual landscape artists and writers. Robert MacFarlane, for example, has been mentioned eight times so far. Here are almost all the references to Caspar David Friedrich in The Wire's first 500 issues. 

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, c. 1818

Visionary Wanderer: a Disco Inferno song described by Rob Young (April 1994)

Tumbling headlong through beatless space and tunes hung on skyhooks, there's a humming tension which comes to a head in "Footprints In Snow", a glorious sunburst-streak of a song where Crause becomes the visionary Wanderer in a Caspar David Friedrich painting, but transmuted to the end of the 20th century, sapping up whatever moments of beauty he can before it all goes down the tube.

Mountaintop: Günter Schickert characterised in an album review by Brian Morton (March 2019)

Schickert has always had his mountaintop side. He is the Caspar David Friedrich of krautrock, his textures often moonlit, like “Nocturnus” here, or loftily speculative, like the closing “Reflection Of The Future”.

Mind Walks: Wolfgang Voigt's approach described in a review of Gas's Nah Und Fern by Philip Sherburne (June 2008)

Voigt has spoken of taking “mind walks” through the woods, imagining a Gas-like music that he would later recreate in the studio, using contemporary looping techniques to evoke “the continuous rustle of the forest”. In his mythic German imaginary, he provides the musical missing link between Caspar David Friedrich and Gerhard Richter, approaching the subject matter of the former – the landscape, the forest – via the blurred indeterminacy of the latter.

Memory Vague: a Oneohtrix Point Never reworking of Chris De Burgh analysed by Mark Fisher (September 2010)

Oneohtrix Point Never’s “Nobody Here”, collected on the album Memory Vague, has been greeted as a sliver of sublimity. His lift – a slowed down four-bar sample – lacks any parodic designs. Instead, the decontextualised phrase “nobody here” is mined for all its evocative power, calling up the empty Caspar David Friedrich landscapes also suggested by the title of another track from Memory Vague, “Zones Without People”. 

Fluffy Clouds: Lisa Blanning didn't enjoy Hans-Joachim Roedelius at the ICA (July 2006)

Sunday night began with fluffy clouds from Hans-Joachim Roedelius. The German Kluster veteran used a film of mountainscape – a single take of clouds forming and reforming – as the visual accompaniment to his music. There appeared to be aspirations to Caspar David Friedrich-style sublime, but the music was just fluff: inert, insipid, insensate, a dreary series of non-events. Even the occasional jarring moment didn’t lift the music from its fundamental torpor. 

Black Metal: Nico Vascellari in an interview with Anne Hilde Neset (December 2009)

"I completely share the parallel between Black Metal and Caspar David Friedrich," he comments when I suggest the connection. "What [Werner] Herzog said about the jungle [in My Best Fiend, Herzog’s film about Klaus Kinski] is directly connected to my interest in Metal: ‘… Nature is violence based. I would not see anything erotic here. I would see fornication, asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away… The trees here are in misery and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing; I just think they screech in pain.'"

Turbulent: Biba Kopf on a La! Neu! album (March 1999)

Gold Rain relegates Klaus [Dinger] to a supporting drum and producer role behind regular singer Victoria Weyrmeister and pianist Rembrand Lensink who recast Dingerland as a 19th century German drawing room. Inside, a family serenely performs five finger exercises beneath a turbulent Caspar David Friedrich landscape. 

Deep Song: a review of the book Jan Garbarek: Deep Song by Andy Hamilton (March 1999)

Garbarek's amalgam of jazz and World Musics can't be understood outside a wider cultural context. But his response is a massive referential overload, covering influences that are either tenuous or non-existent. We are treated, in order of relevance, to discussions about Norwegian culture, German Romantics - artist Caspar David Friedrich and poet Hölderlin -TS Eliot, Freud, Auschwitz. ... The song may be deep, but surely not that deep.

Hyperreal: Carsten Nicolai interviewed by Rob Young (June 2010) 

“I totally related to the Romantic movement,” he enthuses. “Most of the time the problem is the name itself. It’s not so much about Romance, it’s very scientific. Actually it’s a total construction.” Here, he mentions how the landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich would make sketches of scenes out in the field, but on his finished canvases would recombine separate sketches in a hyperreal, intensified fashion. “Those landscapes don’t exist: they are virtual reality, you could say.” Romanticism, Nicolai believes, is “really important when you are from Germany, because it’s a source. Even if you don’t know you have a relationship [with it], you have a relationship."

Techno fetishists: second-rate Friedrichs in a review of the Atonal festival by Derek Walmsley (October 2015)

A solo set from Alessandro Cortini is so gothic and brooding that it turns insular, and although Lustmord has some of the most beautiful visuals of the weekend, his evocations of dread and probing of psychological pressure points are so subjective they fall flat with many. The droners and techno fetishists at Atonal come across like doomed Romantics. You wonder if, with time, the greyscale portentousness of these and similar performances (typically the ones where artists seem most wedded to their laptops) will be looked back on with the same bemusement as so many forgotten 19th century German Romantic landscape painters – second-rate Caspar David Friedrichs of the dull sublime.

 Communicational Sublime: Mark Fisher on Kraftwerk (October 2009)

Kraftwerk sensed here a new version of the sublime, which they adapted into a European context. Theirs was a communicational sublime which replaced the Caspar David Friedrich mountain panoramas of the classical sublime with the neon vistas of midnight cities and the intricacies of circuitry. Communication, in the sense that geographers use it – comprising not only telephones, computers, photographs and stock exchanges, but also roads and trains – is Kraftwerk’s great theme.

Sounds of Waste: a Jacob Kirkegaard exhibition reviewed by George Grella (May 2021)

If there’s dread in hearing the environment swamped by the wastefulness of consumer capitalism, it’s that of the sublime. Kirkegaard thinks that any listener could find something beautiful in the sounds of waste that he’s assembled, and TESTIMONIUM exerts the same fascination as a Caspar David Friedrich painting. There may be something dreadful out there, but that just makes one want to touch it even more.

Singing Toward The Wind Now

I was going to write here about Raven Chacon after seeing him perform at Tate Modern's Preemptive Listening Symposium in 2024. I didn't have time then, nor when he was featured in The Wire magazine in April this year (see above), but he is definitely overdue a mention. Chacon described Field Recordings  (1999), his first piece, and For Four (Caldera), a recent 2024 performance, in an Art in America article:  

Field Recordings - 'The idea was to go to different places I’m very familiar with, two of them on Navajo Nation land, to find locations that would be very quiet. ... Then I started making these postcards that are also flexi-discs you can play on a turntable. The idea was to make something like tourist mementos. I have a few pieces like this that critique people’s thinking of ”deep listening,” or going to places in the Southwest and meditating and having profound experiences in silence—the tourist nature of going to places like Monument Valley or places in the Navajo Nation and sending postcards to friends.'

For Four (Caldera) - 'This piece can be performed in any valley that was created by some kind of disruption. This valley is a volcanic crater, from an eruption millions of years ago. Over one of the hills is Los Alamos National Laboratory, where they developed the atomic bomb. Within the piece there are four singers who sing the contour of the landscape as a melody. ... Another version of this piece in Norway has a much different sound. That one has joikers, who practice a tradition of Sámi singing that already is influenced by the landscape, whether literally by the contours of the horizon or something more about stories within a place.' 

As another example of his approach to landscape, I am embedding a YouTube clip here from an installation midway through his career, Singing Toward The Wind Now / Singing Toward The Sun Now. These are sculptures in Arizona's Canyon de Chelly: two function as harps and two are solar-powered oscillators that provide a beat. 

When you look across Raven Chacon's career you can a see various ways landscape has been a source for his work: 

• The soundscape captured and amplified via field recordings. 
• The natural environment playing instruments (as in the clip above).
• The form of the landscape shaping the form of song, as in For Four (Caldera).
• Natural sounds informing musical compositions, e.g. Owl Song which features on his recent Voiceless Mass album.
• Ancient petroglyphs found in the desert landscape as an inspiration for graphic scores.
• Site specific events where surrounding sounds interact with a composition, like the 2019 performance at San Francisco's Land's End. 

And then there is landscape as a zone of conflict, as in the Dispatch project where he recorded crowds protesting against a pipeline being drilled through the Standing Rock Reservation. Dispatch 2: The Gathering involves prompts for players 'derived from an analysis of the dynamics and organisation of the Water Protectors ... not glossing over the miscommunication, profiteering, and injustices.' He begins this piece with a meditation on the rock itself.

Rocks have harmonics, resonant frequencies. They are also deities, lives begun millions of years ago, witnesses to the formation of the earth. They can pick up the tremors of extractive colonialism exposing wide caverns that lead to trails deep inside the ground, generating sludge and slurry, releasing poisons meant to stay undisturbed. The time is now to protect these rocks as though it is a last stand.

Balcony in the Forest

I recently read this beautiful novel and will mention it here for the way it evokes the Ardennes forest landscape during the winter of 1939-40. Its hero, Grange, is a lieutenant in the French army posted to a concrete bunker on the Belgian border. 

Ostensibly readying for war, Grange instead spends his time observing the change in seasons, falling in love with a young free-spirited widow, and contemplating the absurd stasis of his present condition. This novel of long takes, dream states, and little dramatic action culminates abruptly in battle, an event that is as much the real incursion of the German army into France as it is the sudden intrusion of death into the suspended disbelief of life.

At the start of the book, Grange takes up his appointment and travels in an empty train along the River Meuse. "A train for the Domain of Arnheim", he thinks, referring to the Poe story with its uncannily perfect landscape which I wrote about here some years ago. The forest has a different quality of strangeness. As he is driven up to the blockhouse in an army truck, Grange observes the denseness of the trees, with just an occasional path like an animal trail. On this watershed there are no streams but at one point 'a thread of clear water ran: it added to the silence of the fairy-tale forest.'

The dreaminess of this world is partly down to the way Grange experiences the landscape on night patrol. Here is an example: 

There was a powerful charm in standing here, so long after midnight had sounded from the earth's churches, deep in this placeless gelatin masked by pools of fog and steeped in the vague sweat of dreams, at the hour when the mist floated out of the forest like spirits. Grange gestured to Hervouët and both men held their breath for a moment, listening to the great respiration of the woods around them that made a kind of low and intermittent music, the long, deep murmur of an undertow that came from the groves of firs near Les Fraitures; over this tidal undulation they could hear the crackle of branches along some nocturnal creature's course, the trickling of a spring, or sometimes a dog's high-pitched howl roused by the moon, such sounds rising at one moment or another out of the smoking vat of the forest. As far as the eye could reach a fine blue vapor floated over the forest - not the dense fumes of sleep but rather a lucid, quickening exhalation that disengaged the mind, making all the paths of insomnia dance before it. The dry and sonorous night slept with its eyes wide open; the secretly wakened earth was full of portents once again, as in the age when shields were hung in the branches of oaks.

I looked up reviews of the NYRB reprint (the translation was first published back in 1959), but couldn't find much online. There is one in the TLS that says 'for all its oneiric qualities, A Balcony in the Forest presents Grange’s fantasies in prose that is lyric, yet precise; Richard Howard’s translation of 1959 still seems fresh. Unfortunately…' - and unfortunately at this point the paywall kicks in so I cannot see what the caveat is! It might concern the young widow Mona, who has been criticised as a male fantasy figure, although I confess I was captivated by her and reminded of the women in Nerval's Sylvie, a book whose admirers included Julien Gracq. There are some excellent articles on Gracq online, for example, Seth Lerer's in the Yale Review and Paul Dean's in Literary Matters, which has a detailed discussion of Balcony in the Forest (which would spoil the story if you want to read it). I have written briefly here before about Gracq's 1976 book of fluvial reveries, The Narrow Waters.

Finally, I will mention that the NYRB paperback has an excellent cover that uses a detail from Peter Doig's etching Concrete Cabin (1996). Doig's cabin is surrounded by trees but very different to the bunker Grange and his four men inhabit. It is Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation in Briey-en-Fôret, northeast France (further south than the setting for the novel), partly derelict when Doig visited it in 1991. As an essay on the Christies site puts it, 'the strange, displaced nostalgia that haunts so many of his landscape paintings has here been transferred from the isolated barns and houses of Canada to a large building in France.' Doig's paintings and etching now preserve a memory of Le Corbusier's building before it's renovation (and perhaps also prefigure a time when it will fall into ruin again).

Empty places

In my last blog post I talked about how disability can impose restrictions on how a landscape is seen and said I would say more about this in connection with Edward Burra, the subject of a current retrospective at Tate Britain. The wall captions explain all this clearly: 

By the 1960s, Burra's already frail health had begun to decline making travelling abroad difficult. Instead, he embarked on driving tours of Britain with his sister Anne. 

Burra observed fields, mountains and valleys as passing impressions through his car window. His attention was also caught by smog-belching power stations and collieries as well as newly built motorways, which had become a common feature of Britain's changing landscapes. His sister would stop periodically so he could study the view intensely. Burra's friend Billy Chappell sometimes joined them. Chappell was struck by the artist's uncanny memory and eye for detail: 

It fascinated me to watch Edward when the car halted by some especially splendid spread of hills, moorland, and deep valleys. He sat very still and his face appeared completely impassive... I do not remember Edward ever making any sort of note: not even the faintest scribble; yet weeks, even months later, the shapes, the tones, the actual atmosphere; and the colour of the clouded skies looming above those moors, hills, and valleys he had looked at so intently, would appear on paper. 

The painting below actually resembles the view from a car window. Here and in other late landscapes Burra makes use of the properties of watercolour - the way that road shades from dark blue to white is really beautiful. Earlier work could at first be mistaken for oil or acrylic, but for health reasons he mostly used watercolours throughout his career. As a Guardian article about an earlier Burra show at Pallant House explains, 'a lifelong struggle with rheumatoid arthritis and a debilitating blood disease meant that he was never able to use an easel in the conventional way. Instead he opted to sit, working mostly in unfashionable watercolour on thick paper laid flat on a table.' 

Edward Burra, English Countryside, 1965-67

Laura Cumming's review of the current exhibition expresses a preference for these late landscapes over his pre-war scenes of 'seedy nightclubs'. But Burra's vision of England can be pretty bleak and depressing. Christopher Neve writes vividly about this in Unquiet Landscape (1990), so I will end here by quoting him. 

Beginning in 1965, Burra was driven on regular car journeys around England by his sister Anne. It was she who chose where to stop. They went to empty places where he could see a long way, in East Anglia, on the Yorkshire moors and in the Welsh borders. He sat wherever she chose and watched impassively from lay-bys, just as he had watched human antics through the fumes of nightclubs, memorizing the faces of waiters so that a long time later he could make accurate and compelling pictures from what he had seen. 

Was it disenchantment with people that led him repeatedly to paint these empty places, or a fascinated disenchantment with the places themselves? He seemed to dread them. They swell, stretch, curve, crease. Bruised clouds stack over them and break open. Floods and fields make their puddles of watercolour. Trees are abruptly lit up in negative as if by a nuclear blast. Rock outcrops are swollen with disease. Chasms dwarf. Bile-yellow and a punishing green can hardly contain themselves. It is as though Cotman were reborn specifically to see England in its worst light... 

Lochan Eck

 

Alec Finlay has two new books out - here I am holding one of them, ready for borrowing at the National Poetry Library in London. Not Sealions but Lions by the Sea features condensed landscapes in the form of ‘place-name poems’, one of which uses a phrase I gave as a title to my book on cliffs: 'the first light greets / the frozen air' (Abergeldie - Brightmouth). These originally appeared in gathering: a place-aware guide to the Cairngorms - there is more information on the Hauser & Wirth website. I was interested to read some of the autobiographical poems in Sealions, including one about Sweeney's Bothy, an artist retreat on the Isle of Eigg which I described here in 2014. There is also a group of poems about Stonypath, the garden designed and maintained by Alec's parents Sue and Ian Hamilton Finlay. Here is one in which he remembers the lochan named in his honour.

LOCHAN ECK 

I miss the skimming
swallows
over the dark lochan 

the waters where I swam
eye-to-eye 
with the blue dragonfly

Alec's other recent collection The Walkative Revolution, published by the Guillemot Press, is a book that takes on ableist attitudes to walking. It is a welcome change from reading about the arduous treks of certain nature writers, which can make even those of us without disabilities feel like we are missing out (see also my comments on the miles clocked up by Richard Long...)  ME and long Covid have reduced Alec's ability to walk, but 'as a ‘not-walker’, the joys of toddling into the fringe of a wood, or along a short beach, are heartfelt and healing. Like so much writing, these texts attempt to heal the experience of exile.' There are poems about paths and proxy walks, a manifesto for minor walks and designs for walking sticks (including a fork-shaped one for Sweeney with the words TIME and TINE). One of the poems concludes 'a chapter of autobiography: Landscapes I Have Sat In' - which reminded me of the Tate's current Edward Burra exhibition, for reasons I'll explain in my next blog post. The book ends with a poem to celebrate the inaugural Day of Access (June 15, 2019), when four disabled people were driven up to an altitude of 720m. 

The Walkative Revolution also describes a new form of 'disability poetics' that Alec has devised: the conspectus. This is explained on the Day of Access blog: 

'Conspectus arose from a frustration that my disability, ME, prevented me walking over and through hilly landscapes. I loved to be in wild places, but my experience of them was bittersweet. ... I found myself, sat on a hillock, an OS map in my hand, knowing I couldn't walk any further, trying to find a new way to belong in the landscape. I began to identify the various summits that surrounded me, picking them out by name. Although I was experiencing distance, altitude, and inaccessibility, from a static viewpoint, I could feel an imaginative connection to the landscape.'

Thus arose a form of 'visual poem / composed from the names of hills / defining the view from a single location ... the conspectus is a place to gaze at the landscape; / a viewpoint where the terrain opens itself to the viewer; / where the eye threads in and out of the circle of hills; /where place-names suggest an ecological narrative.'