Winter light

Beautiful winter light yesterday burnishing St Pauls and giving a classical Claudian harmony to the the City and the river. At Tate Modern they were half way through Figuring Landscapes, a programme of British and Australian artist films conceived by Steven Ball and Catherine Elwes. The segment I saw was called Surroundings; here are a few comments on each of the films:

Nick Collins, Tidemills, UK, 2002, 10 min
Simply a selection of picturesque sunlit shots of the beach at Newhaven - golden light, distant figures, eroding harbour walls, rust coloured lichen, details of plants and washed up shoes. It reminded me of the kind of thing I video on holiday when I'm not pointing the camera at my children.

Sofia Dahlgren, Winter Light, UK, 2005, 4 min
Last time I visited the denstist they had one of those digital moving photographs of a waterfall. This was rather similar: a silent image of slightly swaying pine trees in winter sun with a rather queasy artificial feel (I could almost imagine Moriko Mori floating out of the woods...)

David Mackenzie, Where the Crow Flies Backwards, Australia, 2006, 6:50 min
According to the notes, 'a dark dream of a sombre landscape provides the setting for the eponymous bird to ply back and forth between tree and modern communication tower.' An impressive combination of sound and imagery, this reminded me of the sort of brooding black and white footage they used to play at Godspeed You! Black Emperor gigs.

Steven Ball, The Ground, The Sky and the Island, UK, 2008, 7:45 min
My two companions and I were unanimous in liking this film the least. After the silence and natural sounds of the previous three, the artist's portentuous voice-over in this film felt particularly obtrusive. Photographs of an Australian salt lake come in and out of focus and are followed by shaky footage taken at other sites. The explanatory notes are not much help: 'the work addresses the problem of attempting to produce landscapes and the uncertainty of representation.'

John Conomos, Lake George (after Mark Rothko), Australia, 2008, 7 min extract
A slow pan around Lake George, the image smeared and blurred like a Gerhard Richter painting (I wasn't so sure about the Rothko reference), accompanied by the kind of soundscape you would expect from this - semi-abstract electronica based on what sounded like field recordings.

Mike Marshall, Days Like These, UK, 2003, 5 min
I remember enjoying this film of a garden sprinkler at the Tate Triennial a few years ago - the scenes of water spraying over a sunlit garden poised somewhere between innocent playfulness and faintly sinister Lynchian quietness. Here Days Like These seemed rather quirky and amusing after watching the slow meditation on Lake George.

Jo Millett, Surroundings: Trees, UK, 2007, 3 min
A short film focusing on foliage, dense and swaying slightly, like the trees in an old painting by, say, Giorgione or Gainsborough. Made as part of an artist's residency at Knaresborough castle, the film was easier to like than Winter Light, but nevertheless felt rather insubstantial, like a short segment from a longer film (Straub's Le Genou d'Artémide perhaps).

Sandra Landolt, Push, Australia, 2007, 4:30 extract
In which someone tries to push a light aircraft out of the frame... Not at first sight a 'landscape film' except that the out-of-focus outback dominates the picture throughout, vast and impersonal behind the struggling human figure.

Shaun Gladwell, Approach to Mundi Mundi, Australia, 2007, 8: 37 min
I was in the minority, liking this one - maybe it depends on how seriously you take the anonymous biker filmed riding through the empty landscape, his arms outstretched as if to take possession of it. There are two versions and the dawn ride I thought rather beautiful - although my friend thought it about as moving as watching someone playing a video game.

Scott Morrison, Ocean Echoes, Australia, 2007, 9 min
An odd title for a piece filmed entirely down in the grass - rapidly cut repeat images of stalks swaying in the wind to a hectic soundtrack which seems to combine wind, insect noises and, later, in a calmer section, birdsong. The notes give a political context: 'as we head for global food shortages, this glistening field of ripening crops takes on the ominous character of a frantic warning.' Difficult to watch but I suspect this one will live in the memory longer than most of the others.

Drosscape

The latest Frieze, a ‘summer ecology special’, is a hefty 265 pages, so I was glad to see the editorial reflecting on the carbon footprint of magazine production. In a review of the Sharjah Biennial (‘Still Life: Art, Ecology, and the Politics of Change’), Christy Lange writes that ‘a number of works only superficially grazed the subject of the fate of our environment (confusing it instead with the genre of landscape or the literal act of recycling).’ With this in mind, as we’re concerned here with the ‘genre of landscape’, I’m not going to discuss the interesting work of environmental artists like Tue Greenfort, who feature in this special edition of Frieze, but I’d recommend looking at the Frieze website, now expanded to include more content, thus ‘saving more trees’. It includes a survey of the field by Max Andrews, author of LAND, ART: A Cultural Ecology Handbook.

A couple of interesting landscape-related things on this site worth drawing particular attention to:

• There is a review of Alan Berger’s new book, Drosscape. In this book ‘Berger classifies drosscape sites into landscapes of dwelling (LODs – voids of land in housing developments), landscapes of transition (LOTs – temporary storage facilities), landscapes of infrastructure (LINs – transportation rights of way), landscapes of obsolescence (LOOs – junkyards and landfills), landscapes of exchange (LEXs – abandoned malls) and landscapes of contamination (LOCOs – military bases and other brown fields).’ There are various other reviews on-line, e.g. at Terrain.org.

• A review of a new Mike Marshall exhibition mentions an interesting new work. ‘In Spoil (2007) Marshall retouched a black and white image of a mountain of debris in a way that both restored original colour to the monochrome image and mimicked, in deliberately debased form, a landscape painting of the Sublime. It’s Caspar David Friedrich crossed with Peter Fischli & David Weiss: by turns meditating on the transcendent qualities of art’s capacity to represent nature, expressing shyness towards art as representation and a love, instead, for the beauties of the commonplace. There are things that are consistently wonderful – flowers, the sun breaking through clouds, the roll of thunder – yet which lose all their power in mediation. Marshall considers how to tackle this problem.’