Twenty Years of Some Landscapes

Richard Long, Ten Days Walking and Sleeping on Natural Ground (1986)

- one of three screenprints. 

Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of this blog and the first people I ever wrote about were Hamish Fulton and Richard Long. Hamish Fulton is still making walks in the landscape - he led one recently as part of a nationwide nature action day. Richard Long is also still very active and celebrated his eightieth birthday this year. His Mud Sun can currently be seen in the refurbished National Gallery, where it is installed 'as a bridge between early paintings and works by High Renaissance artists in the collection.' Meanwhile Tate Modern has an 'Artist Room' devoted to work by Long, including the text piece I photographed above. Tate Modern is celebrating its own anniversary this year - it opened twenty-five years ago with a thematic display that juxtaposed Richard Long and Claude Monet under 'Landscape, Matter, Environment'. This did Long no favours and indeed Adrian Searle called it the curators' 'most glaringly awful moment ... the large, tremblingly beautiful Monet waterlily painting, which for many years hung in the National Gallery, opposite a wall-filling black and white splattery drawing by Richard Long.' However, I remember liking the idea of muddling up different kinds of art in this way. My blog has always jumped around and alighted on anybody that could be classified under the broad headings of 'landscape' and 'culture'.   

That first post I wrote in November 2005 referred to Ubuweb, a site that's been going longer than my blog (I'm pleased to see the link still works). They have a short sound file in which Long can be heard reading his 1988 text work Desert Circle:

Camel dropping to thorn. Thorn to yellow flower. Yellow flower to ant. Ant to white stone. White stone to black stone. Black stone to stick. Stick to goat’s horn. Goat’s horn so seed pod. Seed pod to cricket. Cricket to seed. Seed to orange stone. Orange stone to beetle. Beetle to place of the camel dropping.

The other sound piece I referenced was Hamish Fulton's Seven Days and Seven Nights Camping in a Wood, Cairngorms, Scotland, March 1985. Fulton once said 'numbers are both of significance and no significance', but also 'I am curious about the number seven'.* I could choose lots of other examples from his walks that use the number seven. This one below signifies nothing about the Japanese landscape but does remind me of the way words fall like rain in visual poetry - Apollinaire's 'Il Pleut' (1914), Ian Hamilton Finlay's 'Pleut' (1963) or Derek Beaulieu's 'Il Pleut' (2024), a booklet I purchased earlier this month at the latest Small Publisher's Fair. The repetition of one word like this was also used in some notable concrete poems - Pedro Xisto's' 'Rock' (1964), Finlay's 'Star' (1966) - although each of these introduced one further term that gave the poems their meaning. Fulton's text differs from these forms of visual poem in remaining, in Wallace Stevens' phrase, 'the cry of its occasion'. I also think the walk's Japanese location provides the words with a specific resonance. The repetition of 'RAIN' gives a calming, meditative quality, like the regular sound of a water clock in a Zen garden. And the absence of anything but rain recalls the mists and empty spaces of Japanese art.  

*This was in a book to accompany a 1995 show in Munich, Thirty One Horizons. The text was reproduced in Phaidon's big survey of Land and Environmental Art, edited by Jeffrey Kastner, but they unfortunately misprinted the title as Thirty One Horrors, opening up the amusing possibility of an alternative folk horror version of Fulton's walking artist career.

Landscape lunettes in the Grand Master's Palace

Just a brief post this time, which I suspect is of mainly personal interest...

Last week my wife was presenting at a human rights law meeting in Malta, connected with her work on the Istanbul Convention, and I came along for the ride. This photograph was taken in the Grand Master's Palace in Valletta, where I was admiring landscapes painted into lunettes in the walls. A nearby sign said 'the walls, pilasters, arches, the tromp l'oeil soffit and some lunettes were painted by the Italian decorator Nicolò Nasoni in 1723-25.' Nasoni is most famous as an architect in Portugal (he arrived in Oporto circa 1725 in the entourage of Dom Antonio Manuel de Vilhena, who was then Grand Master of the Order) and his work extended to landscape garden design, incorporating his own fountains and statues. However, the landscape painting above is not by Nasoni, it dates from the island's hundred and fifty year period as a British colony. An online article suggests that these new paintings aimed to demonstrate 'the British connection with Malta and also to portray the British rulers as the natural heirs of the glory that was the Order’s reign.' Obviously most of them relate to identifiable Maltese landmarks but research has found that some motifs are English, 'such as an octagonal tower in Tunbridge Wells, and another of a bridge that has since been modified in Bath.' They were painted in 1887 by 'none other than the grandfather of Judge Giovanni Bonello, an artist by the name of Giovanni Bonello, after whom his grandson was named.' Judge Bonello was actually an eminent member of the European Court of Human Rights, described on his retirement as 'a man of broad and deep culture, a connoisseur of great art and a distinguished historian.'