Maps of Other Possibilities

Yesterday I went to a wonderful event at Tate Britain devoted to the Bow Gamelan Ensemble. There were three short films and then a conversation between Louisa Buck and the two remaining members, Anne Bean and Richard Wilson. It was probably one of the best artist talks I've ever been to - they were so engaging, articulate and inspiring. Paul Burwell died in 2007 but his thoughts were captured in one of the films, framed by retrospective questions from Bean. His Guardian obituary described the time when, 'memorably for those who were there, Burwell engaged the leader of the famous Kodo Drummers in a drum battle that traversed the entire harbour area of Sado Island, Japan.' Bean reminisced about this experience, recalling how it had ended with the Japanese drummer bowing in respect. 

I have mentioned the Bow Gamelan Ensemble before on this blog, as the highlight of a 2013 exhibition about the Thames. 'Most enjoyable of all, there is footage of The Bow Gamelan Ensemble from 1985, performing 51º 29'.9"North - 0º11' East, Rainham Barges, bashing out music from makeshift instruments at the river's edge as the tide rises and night falls.' You can read more about this performance on the Ensemble's website: 

'they were filmed for over ten hours as the tide ebbed and flowed capturing the massive energy of this amount of incoming water and the ways one could harness this power to shift and shape sound. As the huge resonant chambers of the barges filled up, they deepened the sounds of the metal reinforcing bars sticking out as they were played with sticks and beaters. Passing vessels obliged by blasting their horns, adding to the Bow Gamelan’s own array of foghorns, sirens and hooters.'

Regrettably I never saw them perform and the old footage of them staging events on derelict land by the river is increasingly hard to relate to what you experience in the modern city. They talked about how cheap it was to live in Butler's Wharf when they first met in the seventies. It sounds like a magical time, with Anne Bean's studio the venue for art world parties that included key figures from the punk movement. From the perspective of this blog, I'm interested in the way they worked at scale and transformed whole cityscapes - Simon Reynolds called them 'the missing link between Test Dept’s metal-bashing clangour and the Land Art of figures like Robert Smithson'. One of their most striking ideas was a concert for cranes, making use of the fact that Docklands was a permanent building site, with instruments picked up and moved around in three dimensions. Their use of pyrotechnics would not be possible now, although apparently they did get away with breaking the rules recently. Back in 1993 Burwell and Bean staged a spectacular event at Bankside power station (an image can be seen in my photo above). The woman who organised it was in the audience last night and she said they were only allowed to do it if they insured the building, but nobody knew what it was worth. So she got a quote from a local insurance company and it set them back £375. A few years later Bankside had become Tate Modern. 

An Outcrop in the Campagna

 Frederic Leighton, A Nile View, 1868

'The keynote of this landscape is a soft, variant, fawn-coloured brown, than which nothing could take more gratefully the warm glow of sunlight or the cool purple mystery of shadow; the latter perhaps especially, deep and powerful near the eye (the local brown slightly overruling the violet), but fading as it receded into tints exquisitely vague, and so faint that they seem rather to belong to the sky than to the earth. At this time of year the broad coffee-coloured sweep of the river is bordered on either side by a fillet of green of the most extraordinary vivacity, but redeemed from any hint of crudity by the golden light which inundates it.' - Leighton's travel journal, October 1868

This panorama is one of the highlights of Leighton and Landscape: Impressions from Nature, an exhibition of oil sketches which we saw at Leighton House last month. It was painted on the first of three trips he made to Egypt - Leighton was a lifelong traveller and, having grown up on the continent, was fluent in several languages. A wealthy bachelor, he was also extremely well connected and for this trip was provided with a steamer to take him up the Nile. He evidently took pleasure in making oil sketches but didn't do them on every trip, or at least so it appears - we don't have a record of them all and he mainly kept them private, only showing some of them late in his career. His modesty about them can be explained in terms of his self-image as President of the Royal Academy, engaged in the highest-regarded genre of history painting, but it still seems extraordinary.

There is an excellent catalogue which apart from anything else smells delightful (mine still has that fresh paper new book aroma!) The main author is Pola Durajska who did a PhD at York on Leighton's landscapes. She and the other authors point out some interesting features of his sketches:

• He experimented with different shapes of canvas (cutting them to size himself) and varied his technique from impasto to thin wash-like effects. 
• He looked for interesting light effects at different times of day and studied the intense shadows and bright white buildings of north Africa.   
• His interest in architecture influenced his choice of landscapes, with castles and towns blending into their surroundings and rock formations shaped like ruins.
• He rarely included figures or local colour and did not record where the sketches were done, making the locations of some of them hard to pin down.
• He also avoided the obvious, painting unregarded corners of cities like Venice and Jerusalem, or framing famous vistas differently to earlier artists.   

I'll end here with one of the Gere Collection paintings normally on display at the National Gallery. The wall text at Leighton House says that 'it is not easy to understand exactly what attracted Leighton to paint this particular grassy, hillside slope in Italy. Without any discernible focal point or distinctive feature, other than a flash of yellow sandy soil in the foreground, perhaps its appeal was in the simple combination of the green mass of the landforms against the deep blue of the sky. This apparently unpromising combination of elements typifies Leighton's approach to finding a subject.' 

Frederic Leighton, An Outcrop in the Campagna, probably 1866

Architecton

Here are J. M. W. Turner's The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons (1810) and an explosive rock fall in Victor Kossakovsky's new essay film Architecton. I watched the latter from the safety of my cinema seat, immersed in the noise and right up close to the violence of rocks crashing down and smashing into themselves. As Burke said of the Sublime, where you are not at risk of destruction, such experiences produce 'a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquility tinged with terror; which, as it belongs to self-preservation, is one of the strongest of all the passions.' Landscape drone footage may now be a cliché in movies, but I did feel watching this that the technology has given us a new way of experiencing delightful horror.

Architecton is good on the life cycle of stone, from quarrying, to building to destruction, but its structure is confusing - you only really understand where in the world the rockfall happened towards the end. A prologue shot in Ukraine feels a bit tacked on. Personally I didn’t care for the music or some of the black and white footage. However, I did warm to the film's central figure, an amiable old Italian architect-designer called Michele De Lucchi. He wanders round Baalbek's Roman ruins, admiring the lovely old stone (no ugly concrete) and marveling at how they cut it with such precision. Back at his idyllic-looking family home in Italy, we see him direct two workmen to build a circular stone garden feature. You worry he is going to catch pneumonia standing out in the snow while it takes shape, although maybe this inclement day was chosen by the director. The result is reminiscent of a Richard Long circle and it becomes clear he aims to let the interior grow naturally, like herman de vries's meadow. In Peter Bradshaw's review he says that despite some faults, the film 'is so striking, especially on the big screen, almost itself a kind of land art.'

His shade protects the plains, his head the hills commands

"The Oak," observes Mr. Gilpin, "is confessedly the most picturesque tree in itself, and the most accommodating in composition. It refuses no subject, either in natural, or in artificial landscape. It is suited to the grandest, and may with propriety be introduced into the most pastoral. It adds new dignity to the ruined tower, and Gothic arch; it throws its arms with propriety over the mantling pool, and may be happily introduced even in the lowest scene."

From Sylvan sketches; or, A companion to the parks and the shrobbery: with illustrations from the works of the poets (1825) by Elizabeth Kent

This quote about landscape by William Gilpin, influential eighteenth century writer on the Picturesque, is an excuse to mention two books by Elizabeth Kent. This one, Sylvan Sketches, is a guide to trees and it was her follow-up to Flora domestica, or, The portable flower-garden: with directions for the treatment of plants in pots and illustrations from the works of the poets (1823). I've always loved the idea of plant dictionaries based on quotes from poetry and years ago tried to compile one myself, in a vain attempt to lodge in my brain botanical knowledge that would enliven family walks and impress my wife when we visited garden centres. Sadly it failed, as I was always more interested in the poets than the plants. You would be hard pressed to beat Kent's two books though - they are delightful. And what makes them especially interesting is that she was part of the Cockney School, fully conversant with contemporary poets like Keats, Shelley and John Clare, whose work she quotes extensively. Kent was the sister-in-law of Leigh Hunt and worked very closely with him, leading to some contemporary gossip (see Daisy Hay's Young Romantics).      

Sir Philip Sidney's Oak, Patrick Nasmyth, c. 1820s (V&A) 

There is of course plenty to say about the oak tree, for example

• She refers to the way poets celebrated an oak planted at Penshurst on the day of Sir Philip Sidney's birth. 'That taller tree which of a nut was set, / At his great birth where all the muses met' (Ben Jonson). Kent says that the Sidney oak 'has since been felled, it is said by mistake : would it be impossible to make a similar mistake with regard to the mistaker?' In fact the oak was older than Sidney and was still going strong when Kent was writing her book. Thomas Packenham included it in his enjoyable survey Meetings with Remarkable Trees (1996), but it died twenty years later. Also on the subject of Sidney and trees, see Rebecca Solnit's negative take which I discussed in a post back in 2011. 

• Another thing I once discussed on this blog, was the references to trees, including oaks, in Virgil's Eclogues. Elizabeth Kent quotes his other poems, The Aeneid and The Georgics, in Sylvan sketches. 'Stretching his brawny arms, and leafy hands; / His shade protects the plains, his head the hills commands' (John Dryden's translation).

• She also includes some lovely lines from 'The Floure and the Leafe', then thought to be by Chaucer: 'And to a pleasant grove I gan passe, Long er the bright sunne uprisen was : / In which were okes great, streight as a line, / Under the which the grasse so freshe of hew, / Was newly sprong, and an eight foot or nine / Every tree well fro his fellow grew, / With branches brode, laden with leves new, / That sprongen out agen the sunne-shene, / Some very red, and some a glad light green.

You can read the text of Sylvan Sketches (an 1831 edition) on the Internet Archive).

In a shower of shadowing roses

We went for a walk in Richmond last week and I photographed this memorial to James Thomson on Henry's Mound. In an earlier post I listed all the reasons why Thomson is unpopular today, but The Seasons, as Jonathan Bate points out in his biography of John Clare, went through over 250 editions between 1790 and 1830. In the summer of 1806 a Helpston weaver showed the thirteen-year old Clare a fragment of the book. 

Clare read as much of the poem as he could before giving it back to its owner. The book was falling apart and most of Winter had gone missing. He was amazed that a work of such beauty could have been handled so carelessly. But the weaver only laughed at him and said that "t'was reckoned nothing of by himself or his friends" ... 

The very next Sunday, he walked to Stamford. The bookshop was shut. He contrived a plan to return on a weekday when it would be open. His job that week was tending horses, so he paid one of the other boys a penny to mind his and another penny to keep the secret. As soon as the horses had been taken outdoors, he headed off. He arrived in Stamford so early that the town was almost deserted. At last, though, the bookseller opened his doors. A copy of The Seasons was Clare's for the bargain price of a shilling (the weaver had paid half as much again for his). 

The sun was now up and it was a beautiful morning. He couldn't wait to delve into his book, but didn't want to be seen reading in public on a working day, so he climbed over the high wall that ran beside the road home. This took him into Burghley Park. He nestled on a lawn beside the wall: 'and what with reading the book, and beholding the beauties of artful nature in the park, I got into a strain of descriptive rhyming on my journey home.'

It was on this walk that Clare composed the first poem he ever wrote down, 'The Morning Walk'. He kept going, writing in secret and used a hole in a wall to store his manuscripts. He borrowed books and tried to teach himself grammar but decided it was better to try to write as he spoke. Later he would say that his chief inspirations had been The Seasons and Paradise Lost, although he drew too on the nature writing in William Cowper's The Task and Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler. He also read the self-educated labourer-poet Robert Bloomfield, whose last volume Wild Flowers, or Pastoral and Local Poetry appeared in 1805. Bate notes that each of Bloomfield's books 'was less successful than the last, and he died in poverty in 1823. By that time, Clare's own poetic career was well under way.'  

John Clare in 1820, by William Hilton

Gathering Grounds

I have been reading Harriet Tarlo’s Gathering Grounds (2019), described by publishers Shearsman as a ‘collection of place-based work emerging from three collaborative projects that took place between 2011-2019 in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire.’ Her collaborator was artist Judith Tucker, who tragically died last year in a car accident. An obituary by Griselda Pollack explains that she was returning from Lincolnshire, where the couple had worked together for many years, painting, drawing and writing poems. They also learned 'from the people living on the climate-threatened plotlands of the North-East Lincolnshire coast where working-class communities of the North have long built fragile holidays chalets, locally named Fitties, around the originally Viking village of Humberston.' Judith Tucker co-founded the LAND2, 'a national network of artist/lecturers and research students with an interest in landscape/place-oriented art practice.' She talked about her 'Night Fitties' work in a 2023 interview and drawings used in Gathering Grounds can be seen on her website. 

I have never been to the Humberston Fitties, or indeed to Lincolnshire (I've a feeling it's the only English county I've not been to). How much of the local landscape can be conveyed by these sequences of poems to someone who has never walked along Humberston Beach and Creek? As you can see from the image above, Judith Tucker's drawings are very detailed, like stills taken with grainy black and white film. Harriet Tarlo's poems, in contrast, isolate individual words and short phrases, set within white space which the imagination can fill in. Her texts create the visual effect of following the course of a walk, or they suggest the pattern of a beach, the shape of a valley, the fall of water or the flight of a swallow. I suppose you could try to get a feel for the place by focusing on references to specific birds and plants: an egret, a skylark, an oystercatcher, geese, sandpipers, curlews, purslane and samphire, thrift, lavender and cow parsley. Maybe with this kind of data a naturalist could narrow down the location and picture an environment, but they don't seem particularly distinctive to me. What lingers instead is an impression of mud and sand, shaped and eroded by local conditions into a series of scenes lit by the changing sky, reflections in the creek and silver left by waves on the beach. Here is a brief extract from 'July PM':

                        dark trees above                      silvery marram                           wind-drift

                                 grasses dune- making                straggling over

                                             fence stake|reflections   downbank

                                                                                                shadows  

The Gathering Grounds projects were supported by Sheffield Hallam and at the end of the book three academic articles are cited which describe the couple's practice-based research. In one of these, 'Poetry, Painting and Change on the Edge of England', they explain that their fieldwork in the Fitties drew on Iain Biggs' notion of deep mapping 'as a hybrid activity in which artistic, geographical and ethnographic practices interweave', with 'poetic ambiguity in dialogue with academic discourse.' They cite various writers of the edgelands and note that England's ad hoc coastal settlements^* have particularly interested artists recently, e.g. 'Clio Barnard’s performance work Plotlands, 2008, Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope's documentary, Jaywick Escapes, 2012 and Julia Winckler‘s community engagement exhibition Lureland: Peacehaven Project.' 

The interviews Tarlo and and Tucker carried out with residents of the Fitties included recollections of a landscape now radically changed, with the sea now much closer inland. "Years ago it was way out, the dunes were 8 or 10 foot deep. Yep, we’ve lost a lot." 

The dunes referred to here have long lost their glory, being replaced by sand banks and gabions, the stones in these probably imported from Norway. The creek, saline lagoons and “pioneer saltmarsh” is spreading beyond Tetney marshes and onto Humberston Beach. The spaces humans value most highly and invented groynes to protect, sandy beaches, are being “colonised” by muddy marshland and an increasingly dangerous creek. Is the saltmarsh returning, re-establishing itself and how far will it go? Perhaps over time, regardless of the decisions human beings make about the Fitties plotland, the original saltmarsh fitties will indeed return... 

^*These places were the subject of a classic study Arcadia for All: The Legacy of a Makeshift Landscape by Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward. The centenary of Ward's birth this year was marked by a new collection of essays.  

The Rock of Montmajour with Pine Trees

We recently went to the beautiful Van Gogh exhibition at the National Gallery. I thought it very well done and tastefully presented, focusing on the art (even if the NG website does offer opportunities for an 'ochre afternoon tea' with Sunflower Chocolate Pot, a 'healing plants of Provence' creative workshop and a 5-minute meditation session based on Van Gogh's Wheatfield, with Cypresses). As Rachel Cooke says in her review, 'on the walls you’ll find only titles and dates (to know more, you must look up each painting in a booklet): a minimalism designed to allow one’s thoughts and feelings to flow freely, unimpeded by talk of bloody ears and gunshot wounds.' 

Jonathan Jones enthused about the show and observed that 

In a conventional telling, Van Gogh’s life in Provence was brutally split, as his first ecstatic months ended in self-harm and hospitalisation. Here, the translation to Saint-Rémy is not a tragedy at all. You see how his style got ever more free there. A later room is filled with landscapes he painted around Saint-Rémy that teeter on total abstraction: in The Olive Trees, the earth erupts in waves like the sea, trees dance, and a cartoon cloud is so free from rules it could be by Picasso.

The 1889 drawing of olive trees above that I photographed in the exhibition shows just how abstract and decorative his work was becoming. 

There is a whole room dedicated to one landscape series: drawings made in the vicinity of the ruined 12th-century Montmajour Abbey. The curators note that its 'terrain put the artist strongly in mind of the abandoned garden 'Le Paradou' (a Provençal word for 'Paradise'), which featured in Emile Zola's novel The Sin of Abbé Mouret (1875).' The sketch below is The Rock of Montmajour with Pine Trees (1888) and it 'includes an obscured glimpse of Arles on the far left. In Zola's novel, the Abbé, who has forgotten his vows of chastity due to amnesia, occupies the wild paradise of Le Paradou with his lover, distanced from the realities of everyday life.' After reading this I thought I would make an effort to read the novel and then do some more in depth comments here, but online reviews of it are not encouraging. A film adaptation by Georges Franju doesn't sound that enticing either. If I ever do get round to either of these I may add a postscript to this blog post.