The Zone

Rembrandt, The Three Trees etching, 1643

I was at Tate Modern today for an all day symposium on The Art of Andrei Tarkovsky. It began with a talk by Evgeny Tsymbal who worked on Stalker (1979) and who was partly responsible for the famous dream sequence which you can see in this Youtube clip. After about 45 seconds in this clip some trees appear. I thought these were reflections but they are actually an upside-down image of Rembrandt’s engraving The Three Trees. Tsymbal said he had recalled Tarkovsky’s use of Renaissance art in earlier films and gone to look for some art reproductions in a Tallinn bookshop. All he found that was suitable was this Rembrandt and an image of John the Baptist from Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece.

Three years ago artist Jeremy Millar was also in Estonia to see and film the locations for Stalker. He too found inspiration in a bookshop – a copy of Ajapeegel by Tatjana Elmanovitsh (1980), one of the first books about Tarkovsky. ‘Ajapeegel’ means ‘Time Mirror’ in Estonian and it is the title of a film Millar is making using footage he shot of what must be one of the most memorable landscapes in modern cinema, ‘The Zone’ through which the Stalker leads his two companions. To be honest I was a bit disappointed with the film in its current state – a series of panning shots and a voice over with echoes of Patrick Keiller and W.G. Sebald. Millar and his excellent interlocutor Brian Dillon had both been at the Sebald symposium I reported on last year.

The rest of the day was quite a mixed bag. I was expecting more artists who were explicitly working with Tarkovskian material – it would have been interesting to hear from the University of Westminster’s David Bate, for example, who has also made the pilgrimage to Tallinn to photograph The Zone. The other artists who did attend (in addition to Jeremy Millar) were Hannah Collins, who has recently done some slow tracking shots and long takes in the style of Tarkovsky, and Hannah Starkey, whose interesting photographs didn’t really appear to have been directly influenced by Tarkovsky. Of the other speakers, Toby Litt was entertaining and film critic James Quandt was the most interesting, pointing out Tarkovsky elements, for example, in Bela Tarr’s Damnation (rain, ruin, entropy), in Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan (windblown grass, a muddy path, church bells) and in Carlos Reygadas (a tree and a road straight out of Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia).

One final reflection on landscape and Tarkovsky: in talking to Jeremy Millar, Brian Dillon used an interesting verb to describe the way the Stalker approaches The Zone and contemporary artists deal with place: they try to ‘incite something from the landscape’.

The Printed Path

I spent the day yesterday at an interesting Tate event: ‘The Printed Path: Landscape, Walking and Recollection’: ‘taking the late German-born writer WG Sebald as their guide, artists and writers consider our relationship to place and its recollection’. The event was linked to the Sebald-inspired Waterlog exhibition which is now on in Lincoln (I probably won’t get to it but I can say that the catalogue is quite good). Waterlog includes a superb new film by Tacita Dean, Michael Hamburger (2007), in which the poet and translator of Hӧlderlin (who features in Sebald’s Rings of Saturn) is seen talking about his apple trees. So inspired were we by seeing this that today we headed straight for Apple Day at Fenton House to buy a selection of unusual apples... Anyway, Waterlog also features Alec Finlay, Jeremy Millar, Simon Pope, Matthew Hollis, critic Brian Dillon and George Szirtes, poet and friend of Sebald’s, all of whom were at Tate Britain for ‘The Printed Path’. Robert Macfarlane is also in Waterlog but was not at the Tate – hardly surprising given how busy he seems to be... Having published The Wild Places, he is now apparently working on a biography of Sebald.

The Sebaldian sense of a landscape haunted gave an opportunity for the ‘Printed Path’ organisers to include Mark Fisher talking about hauntological music, with extracts from Brian Eno and the Belbury Poly, both of whom I have talked about here before. The Tate event also included Iain Sinclair (always good value), Geoff Dyer (also excellent), Marina Warner and her colleague from Essex University, Philip Terry, who has taken an Oulipian strategy from Queneau’s Morale Élémentaire and applied it to landscape. Terry’s Elementary Estuaries are a string of brief descriptors like a text piece by Fulton or Long - they can be seen at the V&A site.

One of the themes of the day was the notion of travelling the landscape in the footsteps of a writer. This is what Macfarlane is now doing in the case of Sebald and he’s hardly the first - I myself once went on a trip to Suffolk searching for Sebaldian locations like Dunwich beach (see my photograph below). At the Tate, Iain Sinclair talked about the walk he wrote about in The Edge of the Orison, following John Clare’s ‘journey out of Essex’, Geoff Dyer described his disappointment on finally finding D H Lawrence’s house in Sicily, Alec Finlay read a poem about his trip to the remains of Wittgenstein’s home in Norway, and Brian Dillon related his attempt to trace Robert Smithson’s Monuments of Passaic. Dillon’s article describing this trip is referred to in an interesting blog, New Jersey as an Impossible Object. I may expand in this blog on some of the themes covered in ’The Printed Path’ when I have a bit more time...

When Faith Moves Mountains

Among the interesting works of landscape art in Tacita Dean and Jeremy Millar's book Place is one they describe as having 'great simplicity and poetic richness': When Faith Moves Mountains by Francis Alÿs. The artist was struck by the hardship of life on the edge of Lima, where seventy thousand people live in shanty towns without running water or electricity. Displaced from the city by social unrest and economic crises, they came to live on the Ventanilla dunes, slowly moving hills of sand that seem like metaphors for the forces acting on the people of Lima. On April 11 2002, Alÿs organised an action he describes as 'at once futile and heroic, absurd and urgent.' Five hundred volunteers formed a line at the foot of a dune and working only with shovels managed to mve it about four inches from its original position.

There is an Artforum article in which Alÿs discusses this work. "When Faith Moves Mountains is my attempt to deromanticize Land art. When Richard Long made his walks in the Peruvian desert, he was pursuing a contemplative practice that distanced him from the immediate social context. When Robert Smithson built the Spiral Jetty on the Salt Lake in Utah, he was turning civil engineering into sculpture and vice versa. Here, we have attempted to create a kind of Land art for the land-less, and, with the help of hundreds of people and shovels, we created a social allegory. This story is not validated by any physical trace or addition to the landscape. We shall now leave the care of our story to oral tradition, as Plato says in the Republic. Only in its repetition and transmission is the work actualized. In this respect, art can never free itself from myth. Indeed, in modem no less than premodern societies, art operates precisely within the space of myth."

Wittgenstein's cottage

There is an excellent new 'exhibition in a book' on the theme of Place put together by Tacita Dean and Jeremy Millar, published by Thames & Hudson. Their introduction doesn't try to place 'place' precisely, but among other things they remark that 'one might say that 'place' is to landscape as 'identity' is to portraiture'. For example, they mention Guy Moreton's photograph, Wittgenstein's Cottage (2002-4), taken as part of Alec Finlay's Wittgenstein project. Both the photograph and the site itself might be seen as beautiful landscapes, but the ruins of Wittgenstein's cottage give the landscape a particular identity.

The book discusses place under the headings 'urban', 'nature', 'fantastic', 'myth / history', 'politics / control', 'territories', 'itinerancy' and 'heterotopias and non-places.' There is also a postcript which gives a four way conversation on place and its relationship with space and landscape, involving the two authors and two art historians: Joseph L. Koerner and Simon Schama. Here are some points they make:

• That we now tend to reject the framed view (even though it is hard to escape - the painting having been replaced by the TV screen), in favour of a wider sense of experience and possibility.
• That limitless space, as in the ocean, remains frightening, but that grids of latitude and longitude have made this kind of abstract space knowable (Deleuze and Guattari).
• That obviously historical change means that places mutate, and that people can value both the monumental and the transient, e.g. landscapes seen through the car window like the frames of a film (Walter Benjamin).
• That society only has a sense of place when it is no longer rooted. Urban dwellers looking at rural society and feeling their own rootlessness start to value 'place'.
• That in the modern world place can be fixed with linear perspective and abstract thinking, and yet do we really know that their was a different sense of place in the pre-modern world?
  
• That places can be experienced and recalled through all the senses (e.g. smells and sounds), but space may be something that can only be imagined.
• That the forces of globalisation may be destroying the specificity of places, and yet those forces may themselves result from the 'staggering boredom' of life in the countryside and the possibilities of the modern city.
• That we understand place emotionally, through memory, and ultimately find it much more difficult to explain than space.