The Little Hollow of Light and Shade

Not far from where we live in London there is a domestic house that hosts art exhibitions, the postROOM gallery. Their most recent show featured these wall texts by Thomas A. Clark, whose work I've discussed frequently on this blog. He has exhibited similar texts at the Cairn Gallery, as you can see in the YouTube clip I've embedded below. In this video he explains the significance of colour, font and location, e.g. blue text (blue is "always a matter of shades and tone of subtlety and instability") is placed under a window "looking onto the sky, which even in Scottish weather can often give a full range of blues." Here in London, entering the immaculate white kitchen-dining room of this Islington house from its small garden, you see a text above the space which seemed very apt when it was buzzing with conversation at the exhibition's opening evening: 'the grove of delight'. Condensed landscape poems like this bring nature into the home. They make you think about the poetics of space - how a room and a grove might have similar meanings for us. They also wittily interact with furniture and fittings: the lamp shade above could itself be 'a hollow of light and shade', and 'the place of stone' below is just above the stone floor, next to a rock-coloured armchair.

 

In one of my first posts on this blog back in 2005 I mentioned the Chinese tradition of inscribing poetic text at sites of natural beauty. I quoted one written by Yüan Chieh (719-772) which drew attention to a scenic terrace and cliff, recommending the place to those weary of the city. Wall texts within a home travel in the opposite direction: from a specific house to an unspecified grove or place of stone, rather than from a particular landscape to urban life in general. Like the poetry books Tom publishes, they leave space for the reader's imagination and recollections. In a world of short attention spans, their brevity is an invitation to pause and reflect, rather than flick forward to the next thing. The texts at postROOM are temporary, but visiting this exhibition you can't help wondering what it would be like to live permanently with these beautiful, simple inscriptions and whether they might, in a modest way, influence the thoughts and conversations of those who encounter them. 

Triple Bluff Canyon

 

As we were in Oxford on Sunday we checked out the new Mike Nelson exhibition at Modern Art Oxford. It includes a new version of Triple Bluff Canyon (above), an installation inspired by Robert Smithson's Partially Buried Woodshed (1970) and the Gulf Wars that had recently taken place when it was first shown at MAO in 2004. The photograph below is one I took when another version was installed at the Hayward Gallery's big Mike Nelson retrospective in 2023. As you can see, this entropic landscape has now reached a further stage of ruin and the trick of its construction has been exposed. It is not a huge pile of desert sand, the sand is just a veneer covering empty space. Meanwhile America is once again on the attack in the Middle East, this time in Iran, and there is an absence where a clear, legal justification should be. As The Guardian reported, its stated rationale kept changing, 'from Iran planning a preemptive strike to lobbying by Israel.' 

Another installation more tangentially connected with landscape is The Book of Spells, a room full of old Lonely Planet and Rough Guides. This concept grew out of an element in Nelson's 2001 ICA show (which has to be one of the best and most memorable exhibitions I've experienced at that gallery). The Book of Spells was developed during Covid lockdowns and reminds me of how trapped we then felt. Confined to a few city streets, 'landscape' felt very distant and it was necessary to subsist on memories of woodland trails and coastal paths. I actually spent those evenings writing myself a personal travel book, covering all the places in Europe I couldn't visit. In an article written to coincide with the Hayward exhibition, Charlotte Higgins talked about The Book of Spells.

They immediately put you out of time, these books. They were once such a touchstone of travel and adventure, and are now obsolescent in the face of the internet. Each marks a moment of history that in many cases is now unreachable: you won’t be holidaying in Moscow any time soon, nor in Aleppo. The room is tiny, claustrophobic, and there’s a strong reminder of the confinement wrought by Covid-19, but at the same time it feels like some kind of unwritten short story. (It reminds me, in fact, of Borges’ The Aleph, in which the narrator encounters, in a cellar beneath a bourgeois Buenos Aires dining room, a device from which it is possible to see every other point on Earth). It is intensely simple in its way and yet heavy with layers of association, and immensely eerie.

Stillness and the sound of cicadas

Can a landscape be still and noisy at the same time? There is a wonderful haiku by Matsuo Bashō that plays on this paradox: 'shizukasa ya / iwa ni shimiiru / semi no koe'. The first word means 'stillness' and the cutting word 'ya' suggests that this applies to everything that follows: 'penetrating into the rocks, voices of the cicadas.' We might imagine the poet becoming gradually aware that the constant sound of these insects is permeating everything, even the rocks, even himself. Haiku scholars have tried to explain the poem - debating the type and number of cicadas (perhaps there was only one), or wondering if he had in mind some kind of porous rock. This latter idea is not as misguided as it might sound, because the region where it was written (halfway through Bashō's Narrow Road to the Deep North journey) does have some soft volcanic rock. And yet it is more intriguing to contemplate the paradox of an ostensibly noisy place that is able to convey a feeling of stillness. 

In his detailed analysis of this poem, Kawamoto Kōji, provides an interesting earlier example of this from Chinese poetry. During the Liang dynasty, Wang Ji wrote a poem called 'Entering the Ruoye Valley' which contained this couplet: 'With the screech of cicadas, the forest grows more quiet. / With the cry of the birds, the mountain stillness deepens.' The famous Song Dynasty poet-politician Wang An-shi (who I once likened on this blog to Tony Blair!) didn't approve of this. So he rewrote it, getting rid of the cicadas and keeping the birds quiet: 

Noiselessly, the mountain stream
   circles the bamboo grove;
West of the bamboo, flowers and grasses
   sport with the tenderness of spring.
I sit under thatched eaves
   facing this all day;
Not a single bird sings,
   the silence of the hills deepens.

Despite his better intentions, Wang An-shi's revision amounted to an impoverishment rather than an improvement of the original. (Kawamoto Kōji, - The Poetics of Japanese Verse: Imagery, Structure, Meter, 2008) 

Kōji goes on to mention other poets who wrote about this soundscape paradox. Du Fu for example - 'with the thwack-thwack of the woodsman's axe, the mountain stillness deepens. In Japan there is a 7th century example (written in Chinese) by Nakatomi no Oshima: 'Leaves fall, the mountain becomes more quiet. /  A cool breeze blows, the lute grows more faint.'  And a later one by Shigeno no Sadanushi (785-852): 'Borne upon the wind, the multitude of natural sounds deepens the stillness of the mountains.' I'm sure some sounds, regardless of their volume or frequency, are more likely to help or detract from a restful mood. Distant traffic noise may be quieter than the wind but it always feels intrusive, representing the constant motion of human activity. 

Bashō wrote his haiku at a temple 'known for the absolute tranquility of its holy compound.' Climbing to the summit he observed massive rocks covered in aged pine and oak trees, giving a powerful sense of deep time. The mood of the temple must have produced a sense of silence, even though the natural world continued audibly around him. Hearing the cicadas' voices in this frame of mind, he could sense them penetrating and being absorbed by the ancient rocks. 

Risshaku-ji Temple where Bashō wrote his haiku
(Source: Wikimedia, Tak1701d)

Camouflaged in the landscape

Ana Mendieta, Untitled, Siluetas Series, 1976

I have written about Ana Mendieta on this blog twice before. In 2013 I gave an overview of how her work connects with landscape art, based on a major London retrospective of her work at the Hayward Gallery. Many of those pieces are back in London and on show in Tate Modern's new Mendieta exhibition. I highly recommend going, even if you're familiar with them already - I've been twice! She is a fascinating figure, a radical land artist but also someone you can discuss in terms of feminism, body art and performance, ancient cultures and symbols, ethnicity and identity, experimental film and site specific sculpture. Here though, I will add a few more words on my central theme, landscape, which was an active participant in the making of her art as you can see from the action of the waves in the Siluetas photographs above. 

One of the exhibition wall texts reads as follows: 

In the late 1970s Mendieta’s Silueta Series became further integrated into nature. Some of the Siluetas became hard to find, or as Mendieta described them, ‘camouflaged’ in the landscape. This shift occurred around the time she left Iowa to live in New York City. Her friend and fellow artist Eduardo Costa told her that such work encouraged him to see ‘readymade siluetas’ everywhere. The subtlety of these works created the sense that a Silueta could be encountered suddenly and at any moment. 

I like this notion that eventually an art work can become a dematerialised idea that we might spot when we are out in the landscape. It would similarly be possible to suddenly come upon accidental Richard Longs or Andy Goldsworthys, although the shapes they use have less significance than the Silueta form. Of course this is not a new idea - 18th century tourists were always spotting Salvator Rosa motifs in broken trees and looming rocks, or admiring Claude-like vistas in the soft light of Italy.

 

Ana Mendieta, Tate restaging of the Old Westbury installation, Untitled: Silueta Series, 1978

It is easy to imagine glimpsing a patch of moss in the woods and seeing in it echoes of Ana Mendieta. The photograph above was taken in Tate Modern, where they have recreated a life-sized forest she made with students for the State University of New York College at Old Westbury. Ana Mendieta's original piece 'was designed to be viewed from afar – it was a forest that could not be entered.' This distancing of the spectator was a feature of contemporary land art, made at some distance from gallery spaces and experienced at a remove, through photographs and documentation. It seems to me that the Tate installation stands in an interesting point somewhere between landscape art, which always assumed a viewer and a view, and sculpture, which can be moved around and examined. It is made of real natural objects but remains static in a gallery, where there is no wind to move the branches or rustle the leaves, or any real rain and sunlight to nourish and illuminate the moss. 

The Ruins of the Temple of Juno Lacinia

Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, Lake Wolfgang, 1835 

Room 1 in the National Gallery currently has a free exhibition of landscape paintings by the Austrian artist Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller (1793–1865). When he started painting studies of the trees around Vienna and Alpine landscape near Salzburg, he was already a well-established portrait painter. This change of course may have been influenced by a trip to Paris in 1830 - his diary records that he saw a Constable there. My photo above of his beautiful 1835 painting Lake Wolfgang can't capture the subtlety of those indigo shades used for the water and mountain slopes. Nineteenth century critics complained that his naturalistic style 'bordered on 'daguerrotype-like precision', but they must have been impressed by how he managed to paint those tiny clouds and distant details with such realism.

Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, The Ruins of the Greek Theatre at Taormina and Mount Etna, 1844

In the 1840s he headed south, where the bright sunlight suited his style. I have stood at this spot in Taormina and photographed Etna above the ruined theatre. The mountain and the sea still looked just like this. However, the Teatro antico was partly covered by protective hoardings (covered in adverts) for renovation work and the main theatre area was cleared of those ancient stones Waldmüller painted and covered with metal seating. From a landscape aesthetics perspective it's a shame, but I have to admit it seems good that this ancient site is being used again for music. As I write this, the next performance they have scheduled is by Italian rapper called Coez.   

Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, The Ruins of the Temple of Juno Lacinia near Agrigento, 1846

Here is another view in Sicily, so lifelike you feel you can walk into the painting and wander among those olive trees. The accompanying wall text has a nice phrase, describing the temple 'silhouetted against a pale blue sky drained of colour by the heat.' A catalogue essay by Arnika Groenewald-Schmidt notes the way a few elements are particularly well defined, 'like the leaves on the trees on the right and the stones and shrub on the left of the foreground. The crowns of the olive trees further away are skilfully modulated and reproduce the colours as closely as possible to how they appear when lit by bright sunlight.' She also quotes Hermann Bahr, a champion of the Vienna Secession, writing at a time when Waldmüller's work was being appreciated by a new generation. 'What power, what life, what sunshine! ...  He already knew back then what light is, he already knew back then what air is.' 

Chalcedony hills and opal oceans

Years ago I read this attractive Pushkin Press paperback which, unusually for a 19th century novel, comes with no introduction or footnotes. The publisher's website provides a brief summary of this 'little known' 1864 novel by George Sand, translated by Sue Dyson: 

While working in a small geological museum, Alexis Hartz meets his cousin Laura, who has discovered a way to enter a geode. Travelling through a vast and glittering landscape of brilliant crystals, Alexis falls passionately in love with Laura. But when they return to the ordinary world, only friendship remains. He yearns for the perfect world of the crystals, and returning there becomes a perilous obsession. 

I am fascinated by the idea of crystal landscapes, maybe because J. G. Ballard's Crystal World was one of my favourite books as a teenager. Here I thought I would extract some sentences from an early part of the book describing what Alexis is shown by Laura, and provide some appropriate illustrations. 

I was with Laura in the centre of the amethyst geode which graced the glass case in the mineralogical gallery; but what up to then I had taken blindly and on the faith of others for a block of hollow flint, the size of a melon cut in half and lined inside with prismatic crystals of irregular size and groupings, was in reality a ring of tall mountains enclosing an immense basin filled with steep hills bristling with needles of violet quartz, the smallest of which might have exceeded the dome of St Peter's in Rome both in volume and in height. 

An amethyst Geode
Image: Wikimedia Commons - Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg)

We were soon on the tallest summit of the great ice peak, which was in reality just a colossal prism of milky hyaline quartz, as was borne out, on a manageably small scale, by the geode which I held as a point of comparison, and just as Laura had declared to me; but what a grandiose sight came into view again from the very summit of the great white crystal! At our feet, the circle of amethyst, drowned in its own reflections, was now only a small element of the picture, agreeable because of the melancholy sweetness of its lilac tints, the elegance of its shapes contributing to the harmony of the whole. 

Hyaline Quartz
Image: Wikimedia Commons - Rama

"Further off, [Laura said,] you can see the valleys where amber-coloured chalcedony is rounded into powerful hills, while a chain of dark, glowing-red zirconium completes the illusion of a limitless blaze. The lake which half-reflects them at its edges, but whose centre presents a surface of slackly lapping waves, is made up of indeterminate shades of chalcedony, whose nebulous fleeciness reminds one of white horses on the sea when there is a steady breeze."

Chalcedony
Image: Wikimedia Commons - Koltovoi

"As for these masses of beryls and sapphires, a material whose rarity is so prized among us, they have no more importance here than God's other works. They stretch out to infinity in slender colonnades which you take perhaps for far-off forests, as I wager you take those slender, tender stems of green chalcedony to be thickets, and those crystalline efflorescences of pyromorphite for carpets of velvety moss caressing the edges of the many-coloured agate ravine..." 

Pyromorphite
Image: Wikimedia Commons - Koreller

"Let us go on a little, you shall explore the opal oceans where the sun, that blazing diamond whose creative power is unknown to me, plays in all the reflections of the rainbow. Do not linger on these islands of turquoise, further on are those of tender lazulite and of lapis, run through with veins of gold. Here is mad labradorite, the reflections from its facets by turns colourless and pearly, and aventurine with silver rain that displays its polished flanks, while the fires of red, warm almandine, whose praises were once sung by a seer called Hoffmann, are concentrated around the centre of its austere mountain. As for me, I love those humble rose gypsums forming long walls, piled on top of each other, right up to the skies, and those fluorites lightly tinted with the freshest colours, or then again those blocks of feldspar, which we call moonstone, because it has the smooth reflection of that heavenly body's rays..."

Labradorite

Image: Wikimedia Commons - Parent Géry

A Map of Some Landscapes

I recently added a Map of Blog Posts to this site, replacing the earlier ones which were were restricted in what they could show. You can see the link above if you're reading this on the web version, or just click here. The map allows you to zoom in and out and alight on a pin to see the title of the post, along with date, location, labels and a link that will take you to it. It's interesting to see the distribution of what I have written about over the years - mostly Europe, America and the Far East, very little in Africa... I should try to fill some of those blanks on the map! There is a search function that covers the information on each pin. In the example below I've entered "mountain" and, because each post relating to mountains has a 'mountains' label, these all show up - lots in China and the Alps. You can also enter the names of people where I have labels for them, e.g. Turner. One caveat with all this is that each blog post can only have one location. In my last post for example I went for Isla Perejil, but might have opted for Gozo or Dakhla. And some of my posts, on imaginary landscapes, have no location at all.