Fireworks in the Himalayas

I was curious to see the White Cube's Cai Guo-Qiang exhibition but conflicted after the recent controversy surrounding his firework performance in the Himalayas, The Rising Dragon, sponsored by an outdoor clothing company called Arc’teryx. According to Artnet, Cai thought he was bringing "energy, awe, blessings and hope to the world,” but there was a swift backlash over a work 'threatening one of the planet’s most fragile ecosystems and for showing cultural insensitivity, as the Tibetan plateau and its mountains are sacred in Tibetan Buddhism.' It sounds like the worst possible kind of art-in-the-landscape. Two days after the fireworks Cai and Arc'teryx were issuing apologies and explanations. Cai said his fireworks were biodegradable and had passed environmental standards when used for the Beijing Olympics, but scientists 'warned that the damage could be irreversible, given the plateau’s fragile ecosystem' and 'pointed out that standards designed for urban settings do not apply at such high altitudes.' An official investigation was launched. Artnet point out that Cai got into more trouble recently for a drone performance in Quanzhou which 'ended in chaos when drones, unregistered with local authorities, were shot down en masse during the event', and four months earlier an event in Los Angeles caused ash to rain down on spectators and unexpected noise disruption for surrounding neighborhoods. 

Cai Guo-Qiang, Mountain, 2019  

Aware of all this I nevertheless decided to have a look at the gunpowder canvases on display at White Cube, where flower and bird forms emerge from attractive and colourful abstract swirls to create 'cosmic gardens'. The curators wax lyrical: 'amber collides with ash-grey in fevered bursts; diffusions of cerulean are flecked with inky lapis; whirlpools of fuchsia and blue converge and dissolve.' The example above is much less colourful; Mountain (2019) was 'conceived in response to Cézanne yet reframed within a broader horizon that unsettles the paradigm of Eastern and Western art histories, advancing instead a vision of heritage as shared experience.' I'm not sure how far it achieves this, but it's true that it resembles both Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire and the misty contours of a Chinese landscape painting. Cézanne was actually the source for Cai’s controversial fireworks in Tibet, via an early unrealised project for a firework display over Mont Sainte-Victoire, Ascending Dragon: Project for Extraterrestrials No 2 (1989). According to Artnet, 'Cai had originally sought to realize the piece both at Mount Fuji, in Japan, and at Mont Sainte-Victoire in France, but was reportedly denied permission by local authorities due to environmental concerns.'

Le voyage vertical

Tatiana Trouvé, Le voyage vertical, 2022 from the series Les dessouvenirs

The Pinault Collection is currently hosting a major retrospective of art by Tatiana Trouvé at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, which I got to see earlier this month. It includes work from the series Les dessouvenus (2013–ongoing) in which 'the Paris-based artist first douses large sheets of coloured paper into bleach before drawing ‘environmental dramas’ atop the stained surface in pencil. Similarly, The Great Atlas of Disorientation (2019) echoes the surreal bleached effects of the previous series, this time rendered in watercolour, recalling mushroom clouds in one work, or smoke and halos in another' (Frieze). These are dream landscapes which blur the distinction between interior spaces and exterior views, like confused memories. However the trees, forests, mountains and quarries also have an 'ominous atmosphere', to quote the Venice curators, suggesting 'a planet progressively destroyed by human action.'

Tatiana Trouvé, The Border, 2019 from the series The Great Atlas of Disorientation

These are not the only ways in which landscape enters Trouvé's work. She is very influenced by writers who I have talked about on this blog before and has made marble sculptures of their books: Ursula K. Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest, Henry David Thoreau's Walden, Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics. I'll note here three more examples of the ways in which landscapes can be seen in her work.

• 'Walking on streets, forest paths, or by the sea, Tatiana Trouvé picked up objects and had casts made of these relics in bronze, brass, steel, and aluminium, then painted them. Each necklace bears the name of the place of the finding and the time Trouvé was there.' These sculptures derived from walks in the landscape relate to various places in Europe, but I was interested to see one that she made at that epicentre of contemporary post-industrial nature writing, landscape and sound art in Britain: Orford Ness.

• Two plaster casts resembling relief maps in the exhibition space 'originated in impressions that Tatiana Trouvé took on the streets of Montreuil in the aftermath of the riots provoked by the fatal police shooting of a 17-year boy of North African descent in June 2023. The molds made from the rests of the riots-burnt garbage bins, melted plastics and scorched shopfronts-transform into an abstracted landscape that registers the volcanic rage of the disenfranchised and maps the turbulence of the present.'

• Another work can be connected to the city that is hosting this exhibition. Trouvé turned an irregular metal form resulting from an accident in a foundry into 'a sculptural terra incognita, a territory or perhaps a volcanic landscape waiting to be discovered. On a sheet of aluminum card are engraved the feminine names of fifty-five imaginary cities from Italo Calvino's novel Invisible cities.' In Calvino's story 'it transpires that all the places Marco Polo describes are aspects of one city: Venice', and 'just like Calvino, Trouvé explores the porous boundaries of memory and imagination.'

Lovely is the hillside

It could be said that a landscape view provides a crucial turning point in Njál's saga. Gunnar, the reluctant warrior, is drawn into a cycle of violence which leads the Althing assembly to order him to go abroad for three years. Gunnar's friend, the wise Njál, warns him not to break this agreement and Gunnar promises not to. But as Gunnar is about to sail away from Iceland, the site of his farm makes him realise he cannot bear to depart. We know this will lead to his killing, which makes the scene all the more poignant. 

‘They rode towards the Markarfljot river, and then Gunnar's horse slipped, and he sprang from the saddle. He happened to be facing the hillside and the farm at Hlidarendi, and spoke: “Lovely is the hillside - never has it seemed so lovely to me as now, with its pale fields and mown meadows, and I will ride back home and not leave.”’ 

Another way in which the saga relates to landscape is through the places that became known for their association with the story, such as Bergþórshvoll, the farm where Njál himself becomes the victim of an escalating blood feud and is burned alive with his family. I have only been to Iceland once and had no time to visit these places, but was aware as we crossed the Markarfljot river in a minibus on our way to Vik that we had been passing through Njál Country. As I've mentioned before, Fiona MacCarthy’s William Morris biography describes his journey to Iceland where he delighted in encountering connections with the saga. 

'Here was Flosi's Hollow, the place where he and the hundred Burners tethered their horses before firing Njál's house. There was the ditch into which Kári Sölmundarson leapt, to douse himself, after leaping from the building in his blazing clothes. And nearby was the slope where he lay down to recover. They were told by the farmer who guided them around that, only recently, in the excavation of a site for a new parlour, a bed of ashes had been found buried deep in the ground.’

The unknown author of Njál's saga was, as translator Robert Cook says, fascinated by law, and many important 'courtroom' scenes take place at Thingvellir (Þingvellir). Towards the end of the story there is a legal battle (somewhat tedious) followed by an actual battle, shockingly taking place at the Althing, with men fleeing for safety across the Oxara river and hoping to reach shelter in the Almannagja gorge. This gorge is the meeting point of the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates and one of the most spectacular landscapes I have ever seen. After the battle, the two sides are reconciled at the Law Rock, the precise location of which is no longer known, because the geography of the rift valley has not been stable over the course of a thousand years. 

Almannagjá photographed by me in 2019

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.