Sahara Project

Tate Modern's Electric Dreams exhibition includes the film Tele-Mack, shot in 1968, featuring the work of West German artist Heinz Mack. It starts in black and white with him driving an E-type through a city, looking like David Hemmings in Blow-Up. Then it leaps into colour - Mack is now in a silver suit carrying an aluminium disc into a stretch of water (accompanied by 'tense music', as you can see from my photograph above). The voice on the soundtrack tells us this is a kind of artificial sun and is an experiment related to the artist's Sahara Project. Next we see him planting fragmented mirrors in a field (a kind of landscape art I've written about here before). Then we see an installation of kinetic sculptures made of aluminium foil and coloured Plexiglas - Mack is wearing a cool sixties suit while a groovy young woman in plastic orange raincoat and hat takes photographs of him. From this Warhol-like scene we are transported to the Tunisian desert, where the artist in his silver suit resembles an astronaut, setting up aluminium sculptures that face into the sun. Here we are witnessing the culmination of his long-planned Sahara Project. There are only two colours - the blue of the sky and the white-brown of the sand, until Mack places a pink translucent sheet in front of the camera. Finally he creates an artificial garden of metal-winged sculptures, the kind of thing you might see in J. G. Ballard's Vermilion Sands (1971). 

You can watch a short video about the Sahara Project on the Guggenheim website. Mack conceived it in the early fifties when he and his wife drove their VW Beetle into the desert and first experienced its intense light. Curator Valerie Hillings says Mack told her a story about how he broke off the mirror in his hotel room and 'took it into the desert to see what happened.' Mack himself describes the attraction of a place with no distractions, the perfect setting for sculptures: a landscape unspoiled by the "fingerprints of civilisation." By 1959 he had worked out his thoughts on paper and exhibited them as a concept, years before the American land artists came up with similar ideas of using remote locations and mirrors. Although light and reflection were central to the work he was making in the sixties, it wasn't until the Tele-Mack filmmakers suggested going out to Tunisia that he got to take these sculptures and set them up in the desert. The key difference here between Mack and earth artists like Michael Heizer was that his work was temporary. He left no trace behind - Sahara Project was thus as ephemeral as a walk by Hamish Fulton (and can thus be viewed as relatively environmentally sensitive). It was also a one-off performance, only preserved on the medium of film. And what an excellent film Tele-Mack is -  I'm not at all surprised it got an honourable mention at the 1971 Venice Film festival.

Postscript 14/3/25

A week after writing this I have realised that Tate Etc. magazine carried an interview with Heinz Mack in which he discusses the film and Sahara Project. 

'The gravity of the desert, its absolute tranquillity, its endless dimensions – all this radiated mystery. In this landscape, infinitely vast and untouched, I now experimented with my comparatively small models and sculptures. This was inspired by the question of whether my art could stand up to this open landscape or would be lost in it. I discovered that, despite the contradictory proportions, something could be created there that had a poetic radiance.'

Pine River and Lone Peak

I've been looking in this 1991 anthology for any interesting landscape-related poems that Peter H. Lee didn't include in The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Korean Poetry, a book I discussed here nineteen years ago. I soon found one - the first poem in the book is a 1580 kasa by Chŏng Ch'ŏl (1537-94) which Lee calls The Wanderings (1580). Its Korean title is Kwandong pyŏlgok^* - sometimes rendered as the Song of Diamond Mountain or Song of the East Coast. Kwangdong is the name of the region that contains the spectacular Diamond Mountains (Geumgangsan), which I have discussed here before in relation to the artists they inspired. Chŏng Ch'ŏl's poem begins in Seoul where the king appoints him governor. He heads north and endures a sleepless night at Chorwon, a town which is now right on the North Korean border. After encountering magpies chattering on an old royal tomb (at least metaphorically), he sets off for the mountains, letting 'my staff lead me'. He walks through Hundred Rivers Canyon to Myriad Falls Grotto, and admires the falling water: 'there silver rainbows, / dragons with jade tails, / turning and coiling, spurt cataracts.' 

In an ideal world someone would have written an illustrated guide to the Diamond Mountains, detailing all the most famous scenic spots, arranged alphabetically or geographically, and illustrating them with literary quotations, paintings and contemporary photographs. One reason my ideal library contains no such volume is that it would be a little hard to write this now, since many of the beauty spots are in North Korea. And, of course, while the mountains and sea might have been familiar to Chŏng Ch'ŏl, specific sites he visited have gone. Early in the poem he passes through Pyohunsa Temple which is still there, but it is the only one of the Diamond Mountains' four great temples that survived the Korean War - American bombers destroyed Singyesa, Jangansa and Changansa. Another temple, Naksansa, was devestated by fire in 2005, although most of its buildings only dated from the fifties, when it was rebuilt after having been reduced to rubble in the war. Chŏng Ch'ŏl visited Naksana, where he got up at dawn to watch the sun rise over the sea. Naksana is one of the Gwandong Palgyeong, eight scenic spots along the eastern coast of Korea which became famous in the sixteenth century. 

Gim Hongdo, Lake Samilpo 

from an album of late 18th century Landscapes Around Mt. Geumgangsan 

Source: Google Art

Lake Samilpo is another famous landscape. It sounds lovely but is now inaccessible, north of the border. Chŏng Ch'ŏl visited and found six red letters on a cliff commemorating the four knights of Silla. 'After three days here / where did they go?' Legend has it that these four Hwarang stayed for three days and nights because they were captivated by the beautiful scenery (Samilpo means Three Days Cove). The Hwarang were Korea's elite male warriors, the 'flowering youth' schooled in Buddhism who visited mountains to train and try to receive supernatural guidance. They flourished as fighters between the mid-6th and mid-7th centuries, after which they became more of a social elite (they feature in later poems like the mid-8th century 'Ode to Knight Kipa': 'Knight, you are the towering pine / That scorns frost, ignores snow.') These four had been in the Diamond Mountains and were on their way down the coast to take part in a martial arts competition. Chŏng Ch'ŏl wonders where the four would have stayed next: 'Were they sitting at Clear Torrent Arbor / or on Myriad View Terrace?' 

Peter H. Lee discusses Chŏng Ch'ŏl's poem in his History of Korean Literature. He says 'the reader feasts on a continuous unfolding of scenes described from various perspectives, encompassing both the sky and sea, and engaging all the senses ... Chŏng’s bold descriptions show great skill in conveying a magnificent scene of nature in simple but carefully chosen words.' I will end here with the poet's description of Mirror Cove, which is northeast of Gangnung and was another of the Eight Scenes of Gwandong.  

Behind the old pines rimming like hedges

I scan a ten-mile long beach

like ironed and stretched white silk; 

the water is calm and clear, 

I can count the grains of sand.

 

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