Stendhal's memoir The Life of Henry Brulard describes his childhood in Grenoble in the 1790s, followed by his departure for Paris and entry into Napoleon's army, and breaks off when he still only seventeen, having just crossed the Great St. Bernard Pass and descended to Milan, the city he would fall in love with. There is a lot about his various tutors, including a drawing master he had around 1795 (when he was twelve) called M. Le Roy: 'a very polite Parisian, dried-up and enfeebled, aged by the most excessive debauchery.' Stendhal goes on to describe a landscape painting that inspired his own sensual thoughts...
‘In M. Le Roy’s studio there was a large and beautiful landscape: a steep mountainside seen from very close to, decorated with tall trees; at the foot of the mountain a stream, shallow but broad and limpid, flowed from left to right at the foot of the last trees. In it, three almost, or not almost, naked women were gaily bathing. This was almost the one point of light in that canvas of three and a half feet by two and a half. … This landscape … was a mixture of tender sentiments and soft voluptuousness. To bathe like that with attractive women! … All this, it may be sensed, is quite independent of the merits of the landscape which was probably a dish of spinach with no aerial perspective.’
The text of Henry Brulard is full of drawings - diagrams really: maps, floor plans and graphs illustrating his thoughts and actions. The one below shows what Stendhal could recall of this landscape painting. At the top it says 'M. Le Roy's landscape' and then the picture is annotated: 'Sky.' - 'Verdure' - 'Admirable verdure' - 'Young girls holding up their skirts or young goddesses.' - 'Water.' - (underneath) - 'A. Tall trees such as I like them'. Whether the actual painting was any good or a mere 'dish of spinach' we will never know.
When I reached the point of sand jutting out among the waves, the spell of the place descended upon me with a positive shock. No mere “scenery” could have produced such an effect. There was something more here, something to alarm.
I gazed across the waste of wild waters; I watched the whispering willows; I heard the ceaseless beating of the tireless wind; and, one and all, each in its own way, stirred in me this sensation of a strange distress. But thewillowsespecially; for ever they went on chattering and talking among themselves, laughing a little, shrilly crying out, sometimes sighing—but what it was they made so much to-do about belonged to the secret life of the great plain they inhabited. And it was utterly alien to the world I knew, or to that of the wild yet kindly elements. They made me think of a host of beings from another plane of life, another evolution altogether, perhaps, all discussing a mystery known only to themselves. I watched them moving busily together, oddly shaking their big bushy heads, twirling their myriad leaves even when there was no wind. They moved of their own will as though alive, and they touched, by some incalculable method, my own keen sense of thehorrible.
This is from Algernon Blackwood's 'The Willows' (1907), 'foremost of all' his tales according to H. P. Lovecraft. In it, 'the nameless presences on a desolate Danube are horribly felt and recognised by a pair of idle voyagers. Here art and restraint in narrative reach their very highest development, and an impression of lasting poignancy is produced without a single strained passage or a single false note.' Blackwood was a great explorer of the outdoors and 'The Willows' was based on his own experiences camping 'on one of the countless lonely islands below Pressburg.' This area on the modern border of Slovakia and Hungary looks like it would be pleasant to visit these days - there is an attractive-looking nature reserve at Dunajské luhy which I am sure is a lot less menacing than Blackwood's 'waste of wild waters'.
Another Blackwood story that deals directly with landscape is 'The Face of the Earth', in which a German professor obsessed with the idea that the Earth is a living Being discerns the semblance of a face in the Dorsetshire Hills. He tries to entice a young student to sacrifice himself in a mouth-like chalk pit ("Come quick. It is the feeding-time.") This and 'The Willows' can be found in a new OUP anthology of Blackwood stories The Wendigo and Other Stories. Editor Aaron Worth points to Blackwood's continuing relevance in 'his pioneering exploration of such topics as plant consciousness and agency, ecological catastrophe ... and monstrous entanglements within natural systems.' A story beginning to attract renewed critical attention for its relevance to colonialism and environmentalism is 'The Man Whom the Trees Loved' (1912). This is set on the edge of the New Forest and concerns a former employee of the Imperial Forest Service in India whose love for the forest outside his English home takes over his life and estranges him from his wife. The way these trees form a single communicating entity anticipates recent debates about the wood wide web.
'The Man Whom the Trees Loved' may be interesting material for ecocritics but as a story it is, I'm afraid to say, pretty tedious and long-winded. 'The Willows', by contrast, is perfectly paced and compelling. Initially the two canoeists feel menaced by the landscape, but what begins with disquiet at the way the trees move becomes something much bigger, the kind of cosmic horror Lovecraft would specialise in.
The eeriness of this lonely island, set among a million willows, swept by a hurricane, and surrounded by hurrying deep waters, touched us both, I fancy. Untrodden by man, almost unknown to man, it lay there beneath the moon, remote from human influence, on the frontier of another world, an alien world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows.
I recently went to look around
RE/SISTERS
A Lens on Gender and Ecology, at the Barbican. In this exhibition the politics goes well beyond environmentalism and feminism, encompassing work that reflects on sexuality, race and the history of colonialism. And yet it would be possible in some cases to wilfully ignore all these strata of meaning and admire a work as landscape art, like Salt Island, a sequence of five photographs embroidered with green thread. We are told by the wall label that Mónica de Miranda's work 'considers the complex experience of Afrodiasporic lives and Europe's colonialist past through a Black ecofeminist lens, drawing on ideas of matrilineal relationships, kinship, migration, slavery and African liberation movements.' However it's hard to get all this from Salt Island and the exhibition would ideally have displayed more of the multimedia project of which this is just a part, The Island. There is a good description of this in a text by Ana Nolasco on the artist's website, including historical background on the “Ilha dos Pretos” (Island of Blacks) which inspired it - stories of an eighteenth century settlement of people of African origin by the Sado River.
Agnes Denes, Wheatfield - A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan, 1982
The addition of new ways of understanding our relationship with the planet make it increasingly hard to position art in this field. Agnes Denes, for example, is included for her famous Manhattan Wheatfield project, but she is now being criticised for using wheat, a Eurocolonial industrial cereal crop, 'implicated in the displacement of Indigenous people and indigenous plants over much of the continent for at least two centuries' (Catriona Sandilands). Today, artists need to think intersectionally. They have to create arresting work while steering (if I can use a mythological gendered landscape metaphor) between the Scylla of 'Mother Earth' attitudes, that equate women too closely with nature, and the Charybdis of panoramic or abstracting viewpoints, associated with power and possession
Back in 1986, Tee A. Corinne's Isis photomontages placed vulvas
in the landscape of Oregon. Did this go too far in equating the female
body with nature? Context is important: Corinne is well known for her
books and images celebrating lesbian lives and these 'landscapes' were
just one small project in a prolific lifetime's work. It is hard to
criticise artists like Corinne, Ana Mendieta,
Laura Aguilar and others for positioning themselves as part of their
environments, as an alternative to the disembodied vistas of landscape
painters or large-scale interventions of land artists. They were 'performing
ground' - locating 'the self not merely in the world but of it' (Lucy Bradnock). Writing about Corinne's work, Tamsin Wilton argues that her 'celebration of woman in the woodland focuses on women's sexuality, the seat of female sexual pleasure. In other words, precisely what is most often erased in the women-as-landscape genre.'
Symrin Gill's aerial photographs of open-pit mines can be seen as avoiding the industrial sublime by 'alluding to the corporeal' (the series is called Eyes and Storms), emphasising the landscape's 'bodily textures' by allowing shadows to disrupt a two-dimensional 'extractivist viewpoint.' By contrast, Sim Chi Yin does provide a beautiful abstract aerial view (below) as part of her Shifting Sands project. But this aestheticisation of the 'infrastructural' gaze' is juxtaposed with other photographs ('the human gaze') that show the impact of erosion in poorer areas of the Global South. Another artist, Mary Mattingly is represented by some striking unpeopled 2016 photographs: Mineral Seep, where a cliff is transformed into a drip painting by black and brown stains, and Ore Transport, where an uncanny, unfathomable concrete structure, framed by grey water and pale sky, draws you into its shadowy interior. But these too are contextualised with a chalk board Cobalt Map showing the complex system that supports its production and distribution, 'a network of violence that percolates outward from the original site of extraction.'
Joseph Leo Koerner's magisterial Bosch & Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life (2016) is so rich in interest it could furnish material for many blog posts. Of the two artists, it was of course Breugel who was most influential on landscape painting. I will do a post on Bruegel, but here I thought I would focus on Hieronymus Bosch. The Tree-Man features in the right hand panel of his great triptych The Garden of Delights (c. 1490-1510), one of the monsters of Hell. But he is also the subject of Bosch's largest surviving drawing (above), transplanted to a scene of marshes like those that surrounded his native town, 's-Hertogenbosch. Beyond the marshes, as Koerner observes, there are 'harbor towns on a maze of waterways, like the huge delta where the Rhine, Meuse, and Scheldt rivers meet; and beyond the visible horizon, at a distance plotted by church spires and vast like the sky, the sea. There the Tree-Man idly floats like some outlandish carrack adridt in an inland canal.'
Some contemporaries of Bosch would have witnessed strange phenomena. Koerner reproduces a sketch of a beached sperm whale drawn by Hendrick Goltzius in 1598 and recalls the story of Dürer trying to sketch another whale on his trip to Zeeland in 1520, only to arrive after the tide had carried it back out to sea. 'Netherlandish shores were natural theaters where wonders could be observed.' Moreover, the Tree-Man 'travels in a real world along waters that, connecting near and far, explain how the monstrosity might have got there.' The fact that this realistic landscape surrounds Bosch's fantastical figure makes the image seem 'to encompass the world complete in itself.' It was only around 1500 that artist's own drawings became collectable and this strange image may actually be the first autonomous pen-and-ink sketch in northern art.
Hieronymus Bosch, The Field Has Eyes, The Forest Has Ears, c. 1500
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Before leaving Bosch it is worth mentioning another remarkable sketch, which at first sight simply depicts a tree in a landscape. Here (and note the characteristically witty turn of phrase which makes Koerner's books such a pleasure), the 'dead tree serves as a shadowy refuge for an owl, which eyes us with dubious intent.' Owls appear at least twenty-five times in Bosch's art and can almost be
seen as a kind of signature. In Dutch they were sometimes called boschvoghele. Above the owl there are shrieking birds and below, at the base of the tree, a rooster pushing its way towards a fox, apparently resting. But this is a Bosch drawing and so there are also two large ears standing in the thicket and eyes scattered over the ground. The slope of the field reminds Koerner of the 'subtle curvature of the surface of the earth, ensuring that whatever the work's statement is, it will be global.' And what does it mean? 'Historians have managed to reattach these stray sensoria to a proverb current in Bosch's day and published and illustrated in a woodcut dated 1546, "The field has eyes and the wood has ears; I will look, stay silent, and listen."' In other words, in hostile times, it is wise to keep one's counsel.
Gu Kaizhi, The Nymph of the Luo River, Song Dynasty copy of a 4th century original (detail)
I love the magical green landscape into which the nymph is disappearing in this painting. How closely this scroll resembles the original by Gu Kaizhi is difficult to say, although there are two other Song Dynasty copies showing similar figures, trees and mountains. In Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting, Wu Hong suggests that the version below may be closer to the original, since it shows a less sophisticated approach to landscape. Gu Kaizhi (c. 344–406) is 'synonymous with the origin of Chinese scroll painting' and was, among other things, the author of an essay on landscape art, Painting Yuntai Mountain. In this he describes one of his own works, which showed a Daoist priest and two disciples, positioned between two cliffs with the empty space surrounding them designed to suggest a place inhabited by gods. The Nymph of Luo River is an illustration of a fu poem by Cao Zhi (192-232), the son of Cao Cao (whose writings I featured here last year.)
Gu Kaizhi, The Nymph of the Luo River, Song Dynasty copy of a 4th century original
'The Nymph of the Luo River' (223) is a beautiful poem in Burton Watson's translation (see Chinese Rhyme-Prose, recently republished by Calligrams). Since my theme here is landscape, I will quote a few lines describing the setting of Cao's encounter with the river goddess. Cao is journeying back from the newly rebuilt and restored capital, Luoyang.
The sun had already dipped in the west,
The carriage unsteady, the horses fatigued,
And so I halted my rig in the spikenard marshes,
Grazed my team of four at Lichen Fields,
Idling a while at Willow Wood,
Letting my eyes wander over the Luo.
It is then that he sees the beautiful woman, but she is invisible to his coachman, and so he describes her to him. This description, drawing on nature imagery, is rather like the song of Polyphemus in praise of Galatea, in Ovid's Metamorphoses, that I mentioned in an earlier post here. As Wu Hong points out in his description of Gu Kaizhi's scroll, 'the verbal metaphors - geese, dragons, chrysanthemums, pines, clouds, winds, sun, and lotus - are translated into pictures and woven into the landscape.' Thus the landscape itself in this painting is a kind of description of the nymph's body.
Although Cao Zhi was not a wilderness poet, his work is full of images drawn from the natural world. His narrators make journeys, real and imaginary, and occasionally they look out over the world and describe what they see, as in 'Seeing off the Yings' (211), where Cao climbs a hill and observes the ruined buildings of Luoyang, the capital that had been burned down in 190. There is a lovely description of Cao Zhi's poetry in George W. Kent short book of translations, Worlds of Dust and Jade (1969, no longer in print). I'll end here by quoting it in full (Ts'ao Chih is the Wade-Giles version of the poet's name):
Ts'ao Chih's is a poetry of the wild and vast forces of nature, of long distances and great heights. It has grand sweep. One of its worlds is that of sadly soughing wind in trees and tower tops, of startling whirlwinds, of remote and silent stars, of the westward hastening dust-darkened sun, of vanishing morning dew, and of passing lonely tufts of cloud. Great sound and motion predominated over colour and texture. It is often a furious world, all of nature restlessly and pitilessly changing as man, also changing, looks forlornly on. But, too, there is the uncanny beauty of the glistening pomegranate tree, the majestic silvery disc of the moon moving in cold serenity, the tranquil bluegreen water of the courtyard pool, and through the night's stillness, the sound of the lone flute. Ts'ao Chih seems at times to glory in this world of change, fury, and beauty, and we are never sure that he wants any other. Children play in the ruins of Loyang; there is splendour and hope in this world.
TheDocumenta 14 catalogue is organised in a way that appeals to my fondness for chronologies - each of the 163 living artists is allotted a double page corresponding to a day during the duration of the exhibition, and is also allowed to pick one date that is particularly important for them. The artists are then ordered in accordance with their special dates, so for example Susan Hiller chose 4 November 1899 (the date Freud's Interpretation of Dreams was published) which means that she gets August 16th, in between artists who went for events in 1900 and 1897. I'm not sure if this makes sense without looking through the catalogue.. in any case it's not really relevant to what I thought I would do here: highlight those artists in Documenta who have been addressing the landscape in various ways. This is not necessarily an exhaustive list but it gives an idea of the range of current practice. Some of these artists are using various media to consider sites round the world that are threatened, contested or marked with traces of recent political change. Others are finding new approaches to the profusion of new land and environmental art practices that emerged in the sixties.
The landscape as artist
Probably every artist at Documenta is influenced at some level by landscape, but some allow it to act on their own work, bring a chance element to the final product. Nevin Aladağ has made a sound piece out of furniture for Documenta but she has previously made city symphonies by filming instruments being played by the environment itself. In City Language I , 'a flute held out the car window is
played by the wind; claves tumble
down streets; a tambourine skates across the water behind a boat'.
That was in Istanbul; in the video clip below she describes a more recent piece made in the playgrounds and pedestrian areas of Stuttgart. Another artist who allows the landscape to complete her artworks is the
Guatemala-based painter Vivian Suter. Leaving her work outdoors, 'she befriends deluge and mud; she invites time to act on her canvases in
the manner of acid biting an etched plate. Implicit in the work is a
politics of insistent experimentation and an embrace of ruin.'
Landscape documentation Khvay Samnang's is represented at Documenta
by work he made in the Areng Valley, the last great forest in Cambodia,
now under threat from a hydroelectric dam project. A few years ago he
highlighted pollution in the lakes of Phnom Phen, wading into them and
pouring buckets of sand over his head. Bonita Ely has had similar environmental concerns and is best known for The Murray River Project. In the video clip below she describes coming to the river in 1977 when concerns over pollution were first emerging. She did field research at five locations, objectively photographing the water through cartographic grids (she says she is fascinated by maps and the way they reflect our real interests - "we don't make maps of where daisies grow, we don't make maps of how a butterfly flies across the landscape"). The ecology of the river continues to be disrupted through irrigation and the construction of weirs: "the health of the river depends on flooding but nobody wants it to flood." Ely has recently returned to the original locations to document how they have changed. She has also reprised a performance piece called Murray River Punch in
which she serves up an unappealing cocktail of all the pollutants that are put into
the river.
Landscape performance
Many of the artists here incorporate performance into their multimedia practice. It might seem a stretch to think of Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens as landscape artists but perhaps we should. Sprinkle recently took a Guardian journalist on an “ecosexy nature walk” - "a nature walk with a former porn star who keeps encouraging me to find
my Eco spot (or E-spot) is much more exciting than anything I’ve seen on
Countryfile". Something perhaps for a future Robert Macfarlane book? Documenta also contains archival material from the long career of postmodern dance pioneer Anna Halprin. In their catalogue essay Pierre Bal-Blanc and Lou Forster highlight the continuing importance of her outdoor dance deck, 'built in collaboration with Lawrence, her
husband, the landscape architect, urban designer, and ecologist, between
1953 and 1954, in the redwood area of Kentfield, California.' Performances that relate in different ways to nature and landscape stretch from The Branch Dance (1957) to Spirit of Place (2009). You can see the dance deck in the video clip below.
Land art structures Agnes Denes is an artist I discussed here in one of my early blog entries, a short post about Tree Mountain. Much more recently she has made another land art pyramid, in Long Island City, New York.Candice Hopkins describes it in the Documenta catalogue: 'constructed
of stacked wooden terraces filled with soil and thousands of various
living plants, the sculpture arcs nine meters up toward the sky. It is a
social structure. Social because the planted material conveys ideas of
evolution and regeneration; the work also cultivates a micro-society of
people responsible for its planting and ongoing care.' You can see images of it in a Brooklyn Rail article
which praises her pioneering role, as a land artist more interesting in
growing things than excavating new landforms. However, it also notes
that she has been criticised for creating in Tree Mountain a version of mono-agriculture, 'the creatures inhabiting her forests aren’t
allowed the kind of complex habitat that would be more to their liking.
We now know that trees communicate through their root systems, educating
their neighbors. Nature has no voice in Denes’s work.'
Artificial landscapes Lois Weinberger works with ruderals (plants growing on waste ground) and for this year's exhibition at Kassel 'he has
excavated a “cut” through the park beside the Orangerie and then
abandoned it to whatever will emerge.' You can see a similar work made in Cologne on his website - what makes it interesting is the contrast between the 'wild' weeds and carefully mown park grass. Twenty years ago for Documenta 10, Weinberger 'planted a garden amongst the railway tracks of Kassel’s
central station. The plants were cultivated from seeds of ruderal
plants collected throughout Central and Eastern Europe, during and after
the collapse of communism. These nomadic survivors, ‘foreign
immigrants’ to German soil, flourished amongst the transit lines of ‘Old
Europe’, subverting any human projection of territorial sovereignty, or
fixed borders, and still do so today' (Tom Trevor, 'Lois Weinberger: The Three Ecologies').
Louis Weinberger, What is Beyond the Plants / Is at One with Them, 1997
Political landscapes
Mexican artist Guillermo Galinda has made instruments from objects found along the U.S. border and for Documenta he is is composing new music scores, 'odes for
border crossers'. The video below shows a more spectacular work about the U.S./Mexican border, Repellent Fence by the Postcommodity collective. Where borders have come down, there is a fascination in what the landscape retains of societies that have been completely changed. Ulrich Wüst trained as a town planner and began photographing East Germany in the 1970s. There were usually no people in his images - 'the sozialistischer Staat der Arbeiter und Bauern is symbolically devoid of its titular workers and farmers.' Edi Hila lives in Tirana and paints buildings that have been left behind in time. "In these abandoned houses hope and the desire to inhabit them has
departed with the migrant. These houses have been transformed into
objects, almost weird and absurd..."
Disappearing landscapes
Here's a good opening line for one of the catalogue entries. 'In August 1988, four days after appearing in the seminal Freeze
exhibition with fellow students at Goldsmiths College of Art, Lala Meredith-Vula
left London for the Albanian countryside, where she began
to photograph haystacks.' While the YBAs did their thing, she continued
making her photographs in what had been Yugoslavia. 'Their forms are
governed by habits of working the land, which are older
than nations. The needs of animals and the poetic license of farmers
play their parts. Yet, even if haystacks do not belong in the polis, are not political subjects per se, they do bear silent witness to history.' There is actual hay from another part of Eastern Europe in Documenta, woven into the work of Olaf Holzapfel. His hay canvases are made with local people in a village on the border between Lower
Silesia and Greater Poland (as explained in an article in Frieze). They are part of a complicated installation, Zawn, with components that 'range the gamut from architectural models of medieval churches and
nineteenth-century mine shafts to the writings of Austrian critic
Kristian Sotriffer and the graphic work of Hermann Glöckner.'
Landscape as memory
Finally, there is art made from the artist's own memories of places that have undergone profound change. Abel Rodriguez was born around 1944 in the Colombian Amazon and became an expert in
plants. He was employed by a Dutch NGO, Tropenbos International Colombia, that wanted local experts and later moved to the city, assuming a Western name. There he began working again with the NGO, creating
botanical drawings from memory. These jungle landscapes 'are the
visions of someone who sees
the potential of plants as food, material for dwellings and clothing,
and for use in sacred rites.' He doesn't consider his pictures as art,
but talks about what they show and how the animals and plants in them behave with the changing
seasons. Fish "start going up the river because they know that the
water is going to
rise, and they're looking for the overflows to enjoy the abundance of
worms and seeds." Monkeys "stay because they like to look at their
reflection, as ugly as it is, in the water."
I have written here before about the connection between land art and The Velvet Underground: Walter de Maria, best known for his Lightning Field, was briefly in an early version of the group. However there is also a connection between land art and The Plastic People of the Universe, the Prague band who modelled themselves on the Velvets and subsequently went down in history for their role in inspiring Charter 77 and thus, indirectly, the Velvet Revolution. In 1969, members of the newly formed group took part in an action by Zorka Ságlová, Throwing Plastic Balls into the Bořín Pond in Průhonice. Ivan Jirous, the art critic who managed the Plastics (a similar role to Andy Warhol in relation to The Velvet Underground) wrote that Ságlová had, with this work, 'joined the growing tendency in contemporary fine art when the artists leave their studios in order to dig ditches in the Nevada Desert, to create configurations of grass turfs, to draw half mile long parallel lines on the desert plateau, ragged with heat' (Nadezda Blazickova-Horova ed., Landscape in Czech Art). Ságlová had already been involved in the music scene, making costumes for The Primitive Group, another VU-influenced psychedelic rock band (we really need Julian Cope to write Czechrocksampler as their Wikipedia entry is just 'a stub'). Members of The Primitive Group were also on hand that day to throw some balls into Bořín Pond.
Zorka Ságlová made three more works that can be aligned with land art, bringing hay inside a gallery, lighting nineteen bonfires on a snowy plain and laying napkins at a site associated with the Hussite wars. She was by no means the only Czechoslovakian land artist active in the early seventies. In April 1974 Jan Mlčoch climbed the Kotel Mountain in 'foul weather' and took some photographs, in an action reminiscent of Hamish Fulton. In contrast to Mlčoch's brief engagement with landcape,Miloš Šejn has built up an impressively diverse body of work since the late sixties addressing the interface between
nature and the body through performance, installation and
photography. And finally there was Petr Štembera, whose early work like Line in the Snow and Painting the Stones (both 1971) treated the environment as a kind of canvass. In Large Pool (1970) he had gone to an island of the Vltava and shaped two sides of a rain puddle into the sides of a triangle, only to see his intervention washed away by the rain. As the Kontact site explains, 'later pieces
dealt with the relationship between the human body and a natural entity,
such as Grafting (1975) when Štembera grafted a bush
sprig into his arm in a way common in arboriculture, or in Sleeping in a tree (1975) when, after three sleepless nights,
he spent the fourth night in a tree.'
2016 marks the five hundredth anniversary of Thomas More's Utopia. The book has little in detail to say about Utopia's topography, although we are told that it was once a peninsula, before a channel was cut through the isthmus connecting it to the mainland, creating a crescent shaped island that is like one great harbour. The land itself is not especially fertile but the Utopians make good use of their natural resources and enjoy their communal gardens. In his introduction to the Penguin translation Paul Turner provides an amusing overview of utopian and dystopian literature, from the vision of paradise in The Epic of Gilgamesh to recent novels by Huxley, Orwell, Evelyn Waugh and Mary McCarthy. More's chief model was Plato's Republic, in which Socrates describes his ideal state. It is in Plato's Critias however, that he imagines an actual location for a utopian society: the island of Atlantis, formed of concentric rings with springs that provide both hot and cold water. Before Plato, Paradise was imagined in the form of Elysium, which Homer located on the western edge of Earth. Turner writes that in The Odyssey 'the description of the Elysian Fields stresses chiefly the superb weather-conditions; but Lucian, completing the picture later, represents Elysium as a luxurious holiday-camp, with honey and scent laid on, permanent background music provided by nightingales, and self-filling wine glasses.'
Ambrosius Holbein, The Island of Utopia, 1518
The first edition of Utopia came with a sketch-map of the island by Hans Holbein's elder brother Ambrosius. However a slightly different version appeared in 1518, within a book devoted to the work of More and Erasmus that had engravings by both of the Holbeins. In this new version the ship's position in relation to the island makes it resemble a skull, slightly reminiscent of the famous anamorphic skull in Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors. There is an interesting article on this in the British Dental Journal which suggests that Erasmus may have suggested a memento mori design as a pun on More's name. At first I thought special dental techniques had been used in this research and that there might have been something uniquely interesting about the 'ship of teeth'. However, the article is actually an excursion into art history by a practising dentist whose 'experience in dental radiology' heightened his perception of concealed anatomical structures. It is a striking idea that the particular viewpoint dentists habitually have of our upturned faces may lead them to read landscapes differently (not what Woody Allen had in mind I think when he wrote 'If the Impressionists Had Been Dentists'). The Utopians may have had need of dentists, as their meals ended with a great variety of sweets and fruits. Dentists are not mentioned explicitly but Utopia has a plentiful supply of medical equipment, experienced doctors and sympathetic nurses, so that 'practically everyone would rather be ill in hospitals than at home.'
A recent survey by Jeremy Cooper, Artists' Postcards: A Compendium, divides the field into ten categories (aside from promotional postcards), each of which could be illustrated with cases involving landscape imagery.
Artist-designed postcards - there are many examples; in an earlier post here I am holding up one that features in the book - by Francis Alÿs, a view of a flat sea with a description of the artist's journey on the reverse. See also the postcard by Laurie Clark above. Artists have been designing postcards since their invention. The future Expressionist Emil Nolde earned money by designing them in the 1890s and his strangest designs were a sequence of giant faces drawn into mountain ranges.
Manipulated postcards - where artists overpaint or erase parts of an image; in Bridges for example Tim Davies covers over the landscape to leave their structures floating in space. I get the impression many artists have done this privately - I've referred before to playful postcards sent to friends by Peter Lanyon and Cooper includes an example by Josef Albers in which he has overwritten an aerial view of the woods near Black Mountain College.
Composite postcard pieces - a fine example of an installation involving a collection of photographs is Susan Hiller's Rough Seas, which I described here at the time of her Tate exhibition.
Postcards in collage - John Stezaker's uncanny film star portraits with landscape postcards over their faces are a well-known example (on show at the Whitechapel recently).
Boxes, sets and books of postcards - among the book's examples of these kinds of work there is Carl Andre's Three Works on Land (1979), a concertina of nine black-and-white postcards documenting three land art sculptures: 'Angellipse', 'Timbering' and 'Quadrill'.
Postcards in mail art - this art form which emerged alongside Fluxus is obviously central to a discussion of postcards in art and the book includes many examples. Michael Leigh's The Arses of Scotland (1996) can be seen in a Lawrence Norfolk article on the Tate Archive.
Postcard presses, designers and photographers - this disparate category includes the output of presses I've often referred to here, such as Coracle, Wild Hawthorn and Moschatel. Among photographers Paul Greenleaf has dealt with landscape in projects like Correspondence (2007-9), where he re-photographed scenes from 1960s postcards.
Political/polemical postcards - a category defined more by purpose than form, this includes Peter Kennard, one of the artists associated with the Leeds Postcards collective, whose oft-reproduced Haywain-Constable (1821) Cruise Missiles (1983) was produced as a postcard for CND.
Graphic postcards - Thomas A. Clark's postcard for his Moschatel Press, below, is an example of a purely textual image; the book provides another one by Peter Liversidge printed in a font that looks as if it might disappear in snow: In the bleak mid-winter months very little stirs on the North Montana Plains (2000).
Thomas A. Clark, Anything which is understood is a postcard to yourself, 2008
Postcards as pictures - lastly there is art in which postcard images are transferred into paintings, as in the photorealism of Malcolm Morley, or prints, like the Katharina Fritsch images of Essen that I've mentioned here previously.
The other artist I mentioned in that earlier post on Fritsch and postcard-based landscape art was Tacita Dean. She is quoted in the introduction to Artists' Postcards: A Compendium:'recently I have begun, quite unintentionally, to collect old postcards thematically. It started with finding an attractive postcard of a frozen water fountain. On finding the second frozen water fountain, I had begun a collection...' Among her postcard-related works is Washington Cathedral (2002), two grids of non-identical found postcards published at different times; the cathedral was begun in 1907 and only finished in 1990 so these postcards represent a colorized dream of the yet-to-be-completed monument. She also produced an edition of postcards linked to her film The Green Ray; I said here recently that the green flash of the setting sun is difficult to see on screen but it is visible in the postcard.
Here is Jeremy Cooper's description (he is fond of exclamation marks) of another Tacita Dean postcard, Lorca's Olive (2007), inspired by a trip to Cadaqués, where
'her host informed her that his grandfather used to tell of having seen the painter Salvador Dali and the poet flirting in a particular olive grove in the village! Dean looked for the olive grove but discovered it had been destroyed by a fire, only one tree remaining. She photographed the tree and made it into a postcard, as if from the 1920s, the time of the alleged affair, putting two coats of silver on the surface of the black-and-white photograph to give the impression of age.'
This postcard is referred to at the end of a 2011 James Purcellreview of an exhibition of personal postcards at the Federico García Lorca Foundation, curated by Martin Parr. 'The
framed cards extend along the wall in an unbroken line. But look
closer, and you can find the moment when Lorca’s correspondence ends.
The family postcards themselves sweep on, albeit with gaps in time. No
mention is made of the atrocities, grief and terror having been
expressed elsewhere, privately...' Tacita Dean's postcard, which featured in another exhibition at Lorca's house/museum in Grenada, can also be related to the writer's death. After being killed by a Fascist militia his body was dumped among olive trees, or so it was thought. 'The postscript to the postcard: Lorca’s presumed grave was excavated in
2009, and was found to contain no bodies. To date, there is still no
news of Lorca’s whereabouts.'
For the past week I have been immersed in the Catalan landscape described by Josep Pla in his remarkable book, The Gray Notebook. The NYRB Classics site explains how it was written:
'In 1918, when Pla was in Barcelona studying law, the Spanish flu
broke out, the university shut down, and he went home to his parents in
coastal Palafrugell. Aspiring to be a writer, not a lawyer, he resolved
to hone his style by keeping a journal. In it he wrote about his family,
local characters, visits to cafés; the quips, quarrels, ambitions, and
amours of his friends; writers he liked and writers he didn’t; and the
long contemplative walks he would take in the countryside under
magnificent skies. Returning to Barcelona to complete his studies, Pla
kept up his diary, scrutinizing life in the big city with the same
unflagging zest and humor.
Pla, one of the great Catalan writers, held on to this youthful
journal for close to fifty years, reworking and adding to it, until he
finally published The Gray Notebook as both the first volume and the capstone of his collected works.'
Palafrugell, dawn, 21 August 2015
If you're interested in an overview there is a New York Times review; here I will of course focus on Pla's descriptions of landscape, illustrated with a couple of photographs I took. To give you a flavour (it would be tedious to quote too much out of context), here he is on the afternoon of 7 May 1918, walking to his family's farm, admiring 'the white Pyrenees against an immense sky' and 'a swath of pink mist the colour of seashells, the mist off the sea in the gulf of Roses ... The rain has refreshed the green of the pine groves and the fields of alfalfa. Everything is bronzed and gleaming. The wheat is about to shift from green to the white, golden foam of ripeness. The small hills undulating on both sides of the landscape - parallel to the sea - are gently luminous, alive and graceful, like a sleeping, breathing nude.'
On a subsequent walk these hills are 'as firm as the breasts of an adolescent girl from these parts' - Pla was a bookish youth, too shy to form a relationship with a woman. His friend and walking companion Joan B. Coromina advances the theory that ones interest in women 'is shaped by the suitability of the landscape in which she moves. There are women for many landscapes, some women are right for only one, and some women for none at all. When the fit is right, infatuation is guaranteed, automatic, inevitable.' Later that year 'the vines are turning gold, the pinewoods wear a thick
layer of dark green and the olive trees an airy silver-gray. The
stubble in the fields takes on a granulated, reddish tone. The whole
landscape could fit nicely between a pot of honey and a bottle of rum.'
However, Pla doesn't see much 'Dionysian sensuality' in
all this - it is no place for 'garlands, cornucopias, and a warm Venus with a dainty head and huge buttocks strolling through a meadow surrounded by trees wreathed in mist. Autumn here is rather serene, linear, and never harsh but
somewhat languorous, inducing a vague, bitter melancholy.'
Pine trees, dawn, 21 August 2015
The Gray Notebook is over six hundred pages long and includes, in addition to descriptions of the countryside around Palafrugell, memorable passages on Girona in the rain and Barcelona, 'turtledove grey', laid out below him from the mountain of Montjuïc. Re-reading some of these now I can see that they are often tinged with sadness, where for example a walk through waves of pine trees, an 'unbroken verdant sea', ends with a depressing encounter with a poor country priest (Coromina complains it "has spoiled the landscape and our stroll. It seems incredible that such pretty countryside can contain so much wretchedness.") I will end here though with an idyllic vision more in keeping with my holiday memories, from one of the stories Pla tells about local characters, in this case an easygoing shepherd.
'If it's hot, he lies under the soft, caressing rustle of the tall pines. From the shade he watches the white, lathering, languid sea. The horizon is blue and cool. A seagull glides by flapping its wings. The landscape has an antique stillness, at once benign and paternal. If someone shouts, the wind carries the cry gently away. Time passes, like a trickle of olive oil.'
'Narrated in fruity tones by future Poet Laureate Cecil Day Lewis, Figures in a Landscape offers a poetic portrait of sculptor Barbara Hepworth and the otherworldly Cornwall landscapes that inspired her work.' This is how the BFI Mediatheque describes Dudley Shaw Ashton's short film and you can hear that plummy voice in the extract below, along with the 'haunting score' by Hepworth's friend Priaulx Rainer. It would be easy to assume that the words in the film are Day Lewis's but in fact they were written by Jacquetta Hawkes, whose remarkable book on Britain, A Land, had appeared two years earlier. The film begins with shots of the sea and coast and the words I have quoted below (punctuation my own), in which landscape, through the forces of wave and wind, is figured as a natural sculptor. It then traces the ways that stone has taken on 'forms rising in the minds of man', from stone circles to churches and mines, standing out initially from their settings until 'seasons and centuries claimed them for the landscape.'
"Cornwall, a horn of rock, its point thrust out into the sea. Smooth or ribbed with waves, pale deep blue or angry dark, the sea lies round about it and from three sides sends up its mirrored light. Here is Penwith, the moors narrowing to Lands End, from the sea coast to the north it is not far across the rusty moors, where the rocks break through the bracken, not far to where the sea lies to the south. The sea is never far. It shapes the rocks, sometimes fingering them gently, sometimes forging them with long thundering blows, hollowing those caves where waves revolve in darkness.
"Or it cuts arches where the bright see light stares through above the waters, the wind blows upon the skin of the sea until it creeps and shivers. It follows behind the relentless roll of the tides. The wind passes its hand across the moors, ordering the grasses, smoothing the rocks beneath. Autumn, winter, spring and summer, the wind and the sea carve the rocks, whittling their images. They are at it now and have been at it a million million years, beyond the reach of clocks."
Whilst the dominant metaphor here may be nature as sculptor, it is hard not to read a sexual element into this imagery. I mentioned this in an earlier post on Jacquetta Hawkes, whose lover J. B. Priestley is quoted as having said of her "What a woman — ice without and fire within!" Ashton's visual imagery echoes the script with shots of standing forms and foaming waves, but what is most distinctive is the way he uses Hepworth's sculptures, placing them around the landscape in compositions that have a surreal quality (see below). The clip embedded here shows Hepworth in her St Ives garden (which Priaulx Rainer helped design), at work with her mallets and files, but around the three minute mark we see a finished piece lying on the sand to be polished by the waves. "The waves beat on the stone and the yielding wood, claiming them back from the small plans of man, they give them the shape of the earth and its tides, but the carver cuts deeper with her seeing eye."
in front of mounds of china clay in a scene from Figures in a Landscape.
"But others came cheerfully to dig for china clay. They piled the dark moors with soft white cones that stood in the staring light of the sea, bright light that breaks into colour."
A new exhibition Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World starts next week at Tate Britain and it will focus on the way her work has been presented
or imagined in different contexts, including the landscape.
From the film Possession (2002): poets Christabel LaMotte and Randolph Henry Ash
These two fictional nineteenth century poets in A. S. Byatt's novel Possession (1990) both draw inspiration from nature. In one brief, intense summer they explore together the coast and moors of Yorkshire. They write under the influence of Lyell and Ruskin but, like their Romantic predecessors, they are fascinated too with myths of metamorphosis, animism and elemental forces. The poems of Christabel LaMotte (her name recalls Coleridge's poem 'Christabel' and the author of 'Undine', Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué) become, by the time the contemporary sections of the novel are set, the subject of close readings by feminist scholars. One such critical study is read by Possession's unassuming hero, a lowly 1980s academic called Roland, just before he sets off to retrace the poets' journey north. It leaves him with a vision of a land 'covered with sucking human orifices and knotted human body hair.' I'd like to quote a paragraph here because, even as an amusing parody of academic writing, it is interesting on writing and landscape. Byatt's novel is full of such extracts from fictitious poems, letters and journals. Here, places reimagined by nineteenth century novelists are reinterpreted a century later by an American scholar who is herself merely a fictional character in Possession - nature transformed and distorted through three cultural filters.
'And what surfaces of the earth do we women choose to celebrate, who have
appeared typically in phallocentric texts as a penetrable hole,
inviting or abhorrent, surrounded by, fringed with-something? Women
writers and painters are seen to have created their own significantly
evasive landscapes, with features which deceive or elude the penetrating
gaze, tactile landscapes which do not privilege the dominant stare. The
heroine takes pleasure in a world which is both bare and not pushy,
which has small hillocks and rises, with tufts of scrub and gently
prominent rocky parts which disguise sloping declivities, hidden clefts,
not one but a multitude of hidden holes and openings through which
life-giving waters bubble and enter reciprocally. Such external
percepts, embodying inner visions, are George Eliot's Red Deeps, George Sand's winding occluded paths in Berry, Willa Cather's cañons,
female-visioned female-enjoyed contours of Mother Earth. Cixous has
remarked that many women experience visions of caves and fountains
during the orgasmic pleasures of autoeroticism and shared caresses. It
is a landscape of touch and double-touch, for as Irigaray has showed us,
all our deepest "vision" begins with our self-stimulation, the touch
and kiss of our two lower lips, our double sex. Women have noted that
literary heroines commonly find their most intense pleasures alone in
these secretive landscapes, hidden from view. I myself believe that the
pleasure of the fall of waves on the shores is to be added to this
delight, their regular breaking bearing a profound relation to the
successive shivering delights of the female orgasm. There is a marine
and salty female wave-water to be figured which is not, as Venus Anadyomene was, put together out of the crud of male semen scattered on
the deep at the moment of the emasculation of Father Time by his Oedipal
son. Such pleasure in the shapeless yet patterned succession of waters,
in the formless yet formed sequence of waves on the shore, is
essentially present in the art of Virginia Woolf and the form of her
sentences, her utterance, themselves. I can only marvel at the
instinctive delicacy and sensitivity of those female companions of
Charlotte Bronte who turned aside when she first came face to face with
the power of the sea at Filey, and waited peacefully until, her body
trembling, her face flushed, her eyes wet, she was able to rejoin her
companions and walk on with them.'
where John Donne lived at the start of the 17th century
John Donne's sixth Elegy contains a remarkable landscape metaphor in which his inconstant lover is compared to a river that makes for itself a new course.
When I behold a stream, which from the spring
Doth with doubtful melodious murmuring,
Or in a speechless slumber, calmly ride
Her wedded channel's bosom, and there chide,
And bend her brows, and swell, if any bough
Do but stoop down to kiss her upmost brow;
Yet, if her often gnawing kisses win
The traitorous banks to gape, and let her in,
She rusheth violently, and doth divorce
Her from her native and her long-kept course,
And roars, and braves it, and in gallant scorn,
In flattering eddies promising return,
She flouts her channel, which thenceforth is dry;
Then say I; "That is she, and this am I."
There is another reference to erosion in Donne's most famous prose passage. 'No man is an island entire of itself,' he wrote in Meditation XVII. 'Every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were.' It is tempting now to misread these words in ecological terms, as temperatures rise and our coasts retreat. We are all diminished by this process, even if we live far from the sea. 'Any man's death diminishes me,' Donne continued, 'because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.'
Looking at players in the World Cup this month I have wondered whether those reports last year that we have reached 'peak beard' can be right, and, if they are, whether we nonetheless still have some way to go before reaching 'peak tattoo'. Sadly I have not spotted any landscape tattoo designs so far on the footballers' arms and torsos (although a quick Google tells me that a couple of years ago VfB Stuttgart's Julian Schieber got inked with a view of his home village of Weissach). In contemporary art, Huang Yan has specialised in this kind of thing, although his work, beginning with Chinese Landscape - Tattoo (1999) is actually a form of body painting. Here's how the Met describes that series: 'Huang covers his torso and arms with traditional landscape scenes, presenting his “reincarnation” of
literati-style painting. The composition, modelled in ink and colors on a
white ground by Huang’s wife, the artist Zhang Tiemei,
follows the natural form of Huang’s body. In the photos, the artist’s
face is cropped away and Huang’s anonymous torso becomes an emblem of
the Chinese everyman who cannot be separated from his cultural heritage,
which, like his racial identity, is as indelible as a tattoo.'
Over the last fifteen years Huang has produced numerous variations on this theme. What happens when a landscape is painted onto a face? In Four Seasons (2005) the model is expressionless under each seasonal view, although in two of them his eyes are open, making it much harder toregardhis face as merely a blank canvass. In Pine Landscape Dyptich (2007), a nude woman takes the leaves and branches painted on her body into the boughs of a real pine tree. Dismantle Landscape (2005) begins with a photograph of another tree-covered model, posed against a landscape backdrop painted in more of a 'Western style'; as the camera zooms out we see her standing on what looks like the floor of a building site and in the last image she is surrounded by construction workers. You can see others in the YouTube clip I have embedded above. Huang has also made sculptural work in this vein: a ceramic landscape skull, busts of Mao decorated with traditional motifs (including a Landscape with Figures and a Boat, 2004), and Pork Landscape 1(2001), which is, as the title indicates, a piece of pork - the fat redolent of swirling mist and the meat a backdrop for blue hills and a tree covered in pink blossom.
When the Copper Canyon Press published Spring Essence: The Poetry of Hồ Xuân Hương, the New York Times discussed it in its Technology section. 'A nearly extinct ideographic script known as Nôm, similar to Chinese
but representing Vietnamese, was painstakingly put into a computer
program, and thus did the works of Hồ arrive in Western bookstores.
Considered one of Vietnam's greatest poets, Hồ was born in the late
1700's and wrote with unusual irreverence and shockingly erotic
undertones for her time. Hồ's work really ''jumped from woodcut to
digitization, skipping the whole Gutenberg process,'' said John Balaban, the North Carolina poet who translated her folk poems and
helped oversee their presentation in the strikingly designed book. Each
poem is presented in three versions, across facing pages: in the
original Nôm, in modern romanized Vietnamese, and in English.' One of these is shown above; another translation is reprinted in full at the Smith College Poetry Center site, so hopefully it is OK to include it here:
Three-Mountain Pass
A cliff face. Another. And still a third.
Who was so skilled to carve this craggy scene:
the cavern’s red door, the ridge’s narrow cleft,
the black knoll bearded with little mosses?
A twisting pine bough plunges in the wind,
showering a willow’s leaves with glistening drops.
Gentlemen, lords, who could refuse, though weary
and shaky in his knees, to mount once more?
At first site this is a simple landscape poem but as the New York Times notes, Hồ's poems tend to have 'shockingly erotic undertones'. This is partly facilitated by the tonal nature of Vietnamese - words can take on second meanings depending merely on the pitch of each syllable. In John Balaban's notes to accompany 'Three-Mountain Pass', he says that Maurice Durand, a French-Vietnamese scholar whose edition of Hồ's poems remained incomplete at his death in 1966, thought that the poem probably describes the Đèo Tam Điệp mountains, 'but, he adds innocently, "l'on n'a pas de grotte avec une grande ouverture." While an actual landscape may have suggested this poem ... the particular contours, the active pine and willow constitute a sexual landscape as well. Pines traditionally stand for men; willows for women.' 'Three-Mountain Pass' is about the compulsion to explore both the landscape and the body - perhaps, it suggests, the differences are no more than a matter of tone.
The Hayward Gallery's current exhibition Ana Mendieta: Traces is well worth a visit. Her Siluetas (1973-80) were an important contribution to the development of art in the landscape and I discussed them here six years ago, contrasting her approach with Antony Gormley. The Super-8 film I mentioned then, Yagul (Burial Pyramid) (1974) can be seen in the Hayward's show. In Yagul, Mendieta was struck by the way ancient Mexican ruins were overgrown with nature and in one of her best-known photographs, Imagen de Yagul (1973), she lies among the old stones, covered in flowers. A similar Ovid-like metamorphosis can be seen on the cover of the catalogue (above). There is a charming story told by her art teacher and partner Hans Breder about the first such work, made spontaneously one day at college, when she simply took off her dress, lay down naked on the ground and asked her fellow students to cover her in grass.
From 1975 onwards Mendieta no longer felt the need to include her own body as an integral part of the work and begun to create the Siluetas, earth-body sculptures shaped by her silhouette. Some of these resemble archaeological images of ancient tombs or tribal markings, others look at first like simple landscape photographs until you notice the small island of mud or bare patch in the grass, suggestive of the human form. Mendieta distanced herself from Robert Smithson and what she regarded as the brutalisation of nature in large-scale earthworks. In a 1985 interview quoted in the catalogue she said, 'I would say if I have an identity with someone spiritually, and their use of nature, it would be someone like Richard Long, although I think his work is definitely very English.'
The Siluetas are undoubtedly her most impressive work but this exhibition introduced me to the variety of sculptural approaches she pursued in the early eighties. There are David Nash-like burnt wood pieces, flat floor sculptures made by mixing earth with a binding agent, and large-scale photographs of figurative forms carved directly into limestone in her native Cuba. She started drawing simple shapes on leaves of the 'autograph tree', clusia rosea, which children in the Caribbean used as writing paper during colonial times. She also used leaf prints as the basis for lithographs in a book made jointly with her new husband Carl Andre (his images were based on a Roman flagstone). It looks like a beautiful book, but impossible to view objectively without thinking of the circumstances of her death a few months later. I left wondering how her art might have evolved by now and whether she could have developed new ways of engaging with landscape and nature.
Emmanuel Maignan, Saint Francis of Paola (detail), 1642
I have talked here before about landscapes that are transformed into bodies, and vice versa. Another example can be found at the top of the Spanish Steps in Rome, in a corridor of an old convent building, part of the Trinità dei Monti. There on the wall is a fresco, painted in 1642, showing a landscape with figures, buildings and small boats. But there is something slightly uncanny about the dark shadows of the hills and certain incoherent shapes encroaching into the view. As you walk away, towards the form of a large tree framing the view, and then look back, the landscape is no longer readily apparent: it has been replaced by the bearded figure of Saint Francis of Paola, founder of the Order of the Minims to which the convent belongs. The painting is explored inAnamorphosis, or De Artificiali Perspectiva, a 1991 film by the Brothers Quay. 'Anamorphosis thrives on mystery, and its masters rarely give away their secrets', the narrator says. But the film includes an animated demonstration using thread and paper figures: 'a peep at the apparatus which Emmanuel Maignan supposedly used to construct his anamorphic fresco of Saint Francis.'
Emmanuel Maignan, Saint Francis of Paola, 1642
The Brothers Quay, Anamorphosis, or De Artificiali Perspectiva, 1991
I've been reading the late Dennis O'Driscoll's Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney. Among the interesting things I learnt was that Heaney's poem 'The Mud
Vision', in which a strange religious apparition briefly visits modern
secular Ireland, was partly inspired by Richard Long. As Heaney explains in another interview, 'the actual mud-vision idea came from seeing a work by the English artist
Richard Long, a big flower-face on a wall, made up entirely of muddy
handprints. It began as a set of six or eight petals of mud and then
moved out and out concentrically until it became this huge sullied rose
window.' Another strange image - a tree-clock made of tin cans - appears in the poem 'Fosterling', although this was not inspired by a piece of land art. In Stepping Stones, Heaney recalls that it came from an old story about a Faustian pact: a band of tinkers built a fantastic clock in a tree and set it to the wrong time to fool the devil when he returned for the local people's souls. Such marvels took Heaney many years to work into his poetry. Growing up he inhabited a 'lowlands of the mind', a silted place where poetry was 'sluggish in the doldrums of what happens'. It took a long time 'for air to brighten, / Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten.'
I've embedded above a brief YouTube clip showing Dennis O'Driscoll interviewing Seamus Heaney and below I've set down a few observations on five landscape-related Heaney poems, with comments derived from Stepping Stones:
'The Peninsula' Heaney mentions in Stepping Stones that this poem (in his second collection, Door into the Dark)
was written after a drive to the Ards peninsula in County Down. In it
he writes about the way landscape can restore the ability to really see
the world when it seems there is 'nothing more to say.' Heaney imagines
driving all day around the peninsula, a 'land without marks', until
dusk arrives, when 'horizons drink down sea and hill.' Then, heading
home, details begin to emerge in memory - 'a glazed foreshore and
silhouetted log' for example. Such an experience makes it possible to 'uncode
all landscapes / by this: things founded clean on their own shapes, /
water and ground in their extremity.'
'Bogland' "I was putting my right leg into the trousers when I got the first line," says Heaney in Stepping Stones.
We have this pair of trousers to thank for some of Heaney's most famous poems. "From the moment I wrote it, I felt promise in 'Bogland' Without
having any clear notion of where it would lead or even whether I would
go back to the subject, I realised that new co-ordinates had been
established." This last poem in Door into the Dark would open the door to others in which the bog and its Iron Age victims serve partly as metaphor for events in Northern Ireland: 'Tollund Man' in Wintering Out and then the poems of North: 'Kinship', 'Punishment', 'Strange Fruit'... The drowned bodies are inseparable from their landscape: the Bog Queen preserved on the gravel bottom, 'between heathery levels / and glass-toothed stone'; the Grauballe Man, who 'lies / on a pillow of turf / and seems to weep / the black river of himself'.
'Gifts of Rain' In Stepping Stones Heaney is asked about a new interest in the semantic and phonetic in his fourth collection, Wintering Out, where poems take the sound of words as their subject. I've described one of these, 'Anahorish', before,
but there is also 'Toome' and 'Broagh', in which the rain beating on
'windy boortrees / and rhubarb-blades' ends suddenly like the word itself, with that gh
that strangers find 'difficult to manage.' 'Gifts of Rain' describes a
flooded landscape and the swollen river Moyola 'harping on / its gravel
beds.' This too is a phonetic place poem: 'The tawny guttural
water / spells itself: Moyola / is its own score and consort, / bedding
the locale in the utterance...'
'Höfn' Heaney is periodically drawn into politics by O'Driscoll's questions and this poem, with its aerial view of a melting glacier in Iceland, is the pretext for a question on the environment (Heaney says he inclines more to lament than protest). 'Höfn' focuses on Heaney's primal fear of the glacier as it looked that day, an 'undead grey-gristed earth-pelt', so cold that it would 'deepfreeze the seep of adamantine tilth'. Heaney is of course 'a man of the soil' and tells O'Driscoll that he has rarely felt as exposed as he did that day over the "stony grey scar of ice."
'Postscript' This is the last poem in The Spirit Level
and is similar to 'The Peninsula', but much more specific: the drive is
'out west / into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore, / in September
or October, when the wind / and the light are working off each other.' The poet observes swans on the surface of a lake but is content to drive on
rather than park and try to 'capture' the moment. The 'known
and strange things' will, he realises, pass by and through him like the wind, catching
'the heart off guard' and blowing it open. Asked about this poem in Stepping Stones,
Heaney says that it came to him quickly, as he recollected a windy day
on Galway Bay: "we drove on into this glorious exultation of air and sea
and swans." You can hear him read the poem in the clip below.
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