The location of a Great Malady

On Wednesday I managed to have a quick first look at 'The Robinson Institute', Patrick Keiller's new exhibition for the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain.  It is based on his film Robinson in Ruins, which I mentioned here two years ago after seeing some preview footage and a roundtable discussion with Keiller and his collaborators: Doreen Massey, Patrick Wright and Matthew Flintham.  You can see footage of a similar discussion at the BFI site, and what they say there is equally applicable to the exhibition.  Keiller contrasts our sense of displacement and mobility with nostalgic concepts of settlement; Massey questions the natural state of markets and asks that instead of thinking about belonging to a landscape, we ask to whom the landscape belongs; Wright argues that ruins are not the product of neglect but are actively created; and Flintham describes the saturation of military sites and the impact of symbols of military power.  On this last point, I wonder how the visitor numbers will compare to Fiona Banner's installation of two fighter jets in the same space last year, which became the UK's most visited exhibition (proving according to Florence Waters in the Telegraph, 'that many of us agree with Charles Moore's terrifying observation in this newspaper's review of the show: that killing machines are objects of great beauty').

The exhibition includes stills and footage from Robinson in Ruins along with related books and artifacts, and art chosen by Keiller from the Tate's collection.  It is almost like a blog in physical form, although a blog's chronological sequence is what orders Robinson's observations in the film; here the images and objects are grouped thematically.  The review by Adrian Searle includes a description of the exhibits visible in the photograph I took below and it gives a good impression of how the exhibition is structured. 'Lumpen black bronze sculptures by Lucio Fontana and by Hubert Dalwood, squat on the floor below a giant full stop painted by John Latham. Each was made within a year or so of each other, around 1960, and all have an air of finality. Little wonder – nearby, in a vitrine, is a copy of the agreement between the UK and the US for the sale of the Polaris nuclear missile, and across the way Quatermass II, a movie based on Nigel Kneale's clunky but still frightening sci-fi thriller, runs on a monitor. A shiny but slightly menacing 1967 sculpture by Kneale's brother Bryan Kneale glowers on the floor nearby. Coming across cloud studies by Alexander Cozens and John Constable, you expect to see rockets slewing through their skies, and below an LS Lowry industrial townscape hangs an Ed Ruscha pastel, emblazoned with the phrase: mad scientist. There's a lot that's mad here. But it's the world, not the art that's crazy.'

Robinson in Ruins begins with a memorable line from Frederic Jameson: "It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations."  Robinson, armed with a notebook and an ancient cine camera, is in a car park in Oxford.  "He surveyed the centre of the island on which he was shipwrecked: ‘the location,’ he wrote, ‘of a Great Malady, that I shall dispel, in the manner of Turner, by making picturesque views, on journeys to sites of scientific and historic interest."  These views are, filmed (according to Brian Dillon) in 'Keiller's customarily austere but rapt visual style – though in this case, as suits a film partly about the persistence of pastoral in the face of rapacious land grabs, the shots are longer. The camera tarries with fields of oil seed rape, nodding foxgloves and shivering primroses until they start to look monstrous, every bit as alien as the relics of 19th-century architecture and décor that so exercised the surrealists. Before Keiller's (or Robinson's) prophetic gaze, the English countryside is a monument to itself, and ripe for revolutionary appropriation.'  Interviewed about this new installation at Tate Britain, Keiller says “I think what is most urgently required to address the economic/environmental crisis is the political will to do so, followed by a certain amount of forward planning. Neither is much in evidence. But art, especially landscape art, has a key role. Henri Lefebvre wrote that ‘to change life we must first change space’. Art can do this.”

The stationary blasts of waterfalls

Paintings freeze the vision of landscape at a moment in time, whilst poems can convey the shifting impressions of a walk.  But a poem that pauses whilst the writer pictures the landscape may be more successful than a painting at slowing and focusing the attention on nature.  Elements of a landscape will in any case be in motion themselves, or appear in a state of constant movement that comes to seem a form of stillness.  In his book Can Poetry Save the Earth? (2009) John Felstiner suggests that this permanence in transience is a natural figure in poetry: William Carlos Williams 'senses an "unmoving roar" in Passaic Falls, A. R. Ammons in an "onbreaking wave" finds "immobility in motion." Derek Walcott recalls Caribbean swallows "moving yet motionless."' Waterfalls in particular seem to elicit this response from poets: ‘Coleridge in the Alps is struck by “Motionless torrents!” and Wordsworth by “The stationary blasts of waterfalls” ... Imagination, momentarily grasping things in flux, admits in the same moment that nature is ungraspable.’  Felstiner quotes Thomas Cole who saw in waterfalls ‘“fixedness and motion – a single existence in which we perceive unceasing change and everlasting duration.”  A poem like a painting catches life for the ear of eye, stills what’s ongoing in human and nonhuman nature.’ 

Thomas Cole, Falls of the Kaaterskill, 1826

Can Poetry Save the Earth? has reproduced on its cover Joseph Farington's view of the waterfall at Ambleside (1816).  Felstiner says that 'Keats saw these falls soon after he'd said "The poetry of the earth is never dead," and they blew his mind'.  It was on his tour of the Lakes in 1818: Keats and his friend Charles Brown arose at six in the morning and headed out before breakfast to search for the falls.  Having heard the noise of the water through the trees, they made their way down to the bottom of a valley ("Keats scrambled down lightly and quickly") to watch the cataract's waters darting and spreading over the rocks, descending into "the thunder and the freshness".  "What astonishes me more than any thing," Keats wrote in a letter to his brother Tom, "is the tone, the coloring, the slate, the stone, the moss, the rock-weed; or, if I may so say, the intellect, the countenance of such places. The space, the magnitude of mountains and waterfalls are well imagined before one sees them; but this countenance or intellectual tone must surpass every imagination and defy any remembrance. I shall learn poetry here and shall henceforth write more than ever, for the abstract endeavor of being able to add a mite to that mass of beauty which is harvested from these grand materials, by the finest spirits, and put into etherial existence for the relish of one's fellows."  Felstiner quotes this letter and truncates that last sentence after the first five words, turning it into a resounding affirmation of the way Keats felt art could flow from nature: "I shall learn poetry here."

Sounding out the Territory

Last night I was at Cafe Oto for The Wire Salon and a discussion of sound mapping, featuring artist Kathy Hinde, academic Joseph Kohlmaier and Ian Rawes of the London Sound Survey.  Of course the notion of mapping sounds pre-dates the internet; R. Murray Schafer's book The Soundscape (1977) for example contains an isobel map of Stanley Park in Vancouver and a sound event map of downtown Boston. But the internet has given rise to a new form of interactive visual map, offering sound clips uploaded and linked to the locations where they were recorded. These maps won't help you find your way, they are designed to take you on a mental journey and often include visual and written documentation as well.  The mapping aspect may even seem superfluous - Ian Rawes started his collection of London field recordings as a lists of sound files.  To some extent, he suggested last night, maps are simply a nice way of organising material, like the London Sound Survey's map of waterway sounds.  And yet another of his maps is entirely visual: derived from field recordings evenly spaced across the city, it simply records variations in the acoustic environment diagrammatically.  It is the kind of map Shafer designed, albeit with more of a sense of humour: the Richmond Park square consists entirely of aircraft sound and 'bloody parakeet squawking noise'.

Yesterday evening began with a quiz (much easier than you'd have thought given that this was a Wire event!) and the purpose of this was partly to prompt thoughts about the representativeness and authenticity of the sound clips you find on the internet.  Would the audience guess that the muezzin chant was recorded in Whitechapel?  (Yes we all did, but the point was made).  Ian Rawes had a similar example, recording an outdoor Caribbean religious service on Canvey Island, a landscape normally associated with oil refineries and the sound of Dr Feelgood.  He thinks that field recordists are generally better than photographers at restraining themselves from trying to 'improve' their material ("you don't get people recording Tibetan monks and then adding reverb").  Modest about his own ambitions, he nevertheless feels that sound maps have a distinct role, and referred to the Hudson Mohawk Sound Gate Spiral Map which combines high quality sound and video recordings in order to demonstrate the limitations of the fixed point of view in a visual experience of landscape.  The website's creators remind us that 'sound waves bend round objects that would easily filter out light' and, in contrast to the visual field, our ears give us '360 degrees of aural perception in all directions at once.'

Whilst the London Sound Survey collects untreated recordings and includes proper documentation (see above), most of the field recordings used in the landscape related-sound art and music I've written about here will have been altered in some way.  Digital sound, like digital imagery, is a sequence of data, rather than a physical trace, and can be manipulated to provide access to otherwise inaudible phenomena like insect sounds or seismic processes (slowed down or sped up to last as long as our attention span).  But the process of sonification can go further, converting maps themselves into sounds, and allowing us to listen in to the ebb and flow of information.  It offers the prospect of hearing the slow or silent processes - economic, social, technological - altering what might otherwise seem be static landscapes.  And it can give us access to places beyond our reach - one of the quiz sound clips was a sonification of data plotting the movement of Saturn.  I was hoping it might sound like Sun Ra, and no doubt it would be possible to design an algorithm to achieve this: the possibilities are endless and there is clearly a risk of creating a misleading separation between sign and signified.  This was certainly brought home to everyone in the audience last night when Joseph Kohlmaier raised the possibility that if you played the sounds of a sonified universe long enough you might get to hear a speech by David Cameron...  

The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire

"In a crowd, he that talks loudest, not he that talks best, is surest of commanding attention; and in an art exhibition, he that does not attract the eye, does nothing."  This was the regrettable conclusion of John Opie, Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy (1805-09), who urged artists to paint '"for eternity," not for fashion and the contemporary acclaim of corrupt and incompetent judges"' (Kay Dian Kriz, The Idea of the English Landscape Painter).  Kriz notes that 'such practices may have prompted changes in the exhibition sites themselves.  In 1807 a commentator on the state of the arts, writing in the short lived Beau Monde, speculated that the (much-hated) red walls of the new British Gallery might serve "perhaps as a precaution against too vivid colours, which a desire of attracting notice has introduced into the school of painting."'  When a few years later John Martin started exhibiting those spectacular paintings that were on show at Tate Britain earlier this year, the Royal Academy were not impressed (but still found it convenient to promote Francis Danby as a poential rival to Martin).  One of the best known art stories from this period involves Turner turning up to add a bright red buoy to the foreground of his seascape, Helvoetsluys, so as to attract attention away from Constable's Opening of Waterloo Bridge.  "He has been here," said Constable, "and fired a gun."

Three years ago I went to the Royal Academy to see Anish Kapoor's gun firing brightly coloured red wax at the gallery wall.  Last weekend I was back, with the whole family, for another contemporary art spectacle, David Hockney's A Bigger Picture.  This new exhibition was inspired by the success of his Bigger Trees Near Warter (40ft by 15ft) at the 2007 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (see Richard Dorment's Telegraph review: 'Hockney shows that biggest is best.')  My expectations were relatively low, based on what I had seen in 2007, when Tate Britain showed some of Hockney's East Yorkshire landscapes along with his selection of Turner paintings.  But overall I enjoyed the exhibition, having stopped worrying about the quality of individual works and begun to view it more as a set of huge installations documenting a kind of postmodern performance of painting en plein air.  For Hockney this now involves iPad sketches, blown up here to about sixty times their original size, and whilst it's true that as Laura Cumming says, they 'appear inert and dehumanised', perhaps that's partly the point.  They depict The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven) and comprise a 52-part work, wallpapering the gallery in a bright computer-screen colours.  According to the RA there is 'a deliberate sense of theatricality ... the viewer is placed centre-stage with the drama of the approaching spring played out on all sides.'  It is the kind of theatricality that was criticised in the sixties by advocates of Modernism like Michael Fried, but, like John Opie a century and a half earlier, they were swimming against the tide.

Rosalind Krauss, in her essay 'Grids' (1979), argued that grids 'declare the modernity of modern art'; they are 'what art looks like when it turns its back on nature.'  In the grids that make up Hockney's landscapes he reintroduces a stylised version of nature, patterns and bright colours that reference artists from the early days of Modernism (Van Gogh, Vuillard, Vlaminck).  In her review, Laura Cumming complains of 'a neutralising tidiness. It isn't just those regular blocks into which the big works are split for ease of construction; it isn't even the superlatively concise draughtsmanship that underpins every image. It is a kind of graphic fastidiousness – nothing too out of place or too wild – bordering on neatness. Can Yorkshire be like that these days?'  Not according to The Telegraph: 'there are calls for the area to be cleaned up before it becomes a major tourist trail.One visitor said: "A tourist trap was mentioned but hopefully not in its present state. We travelled the whole length of Woldgate recently and the whole route was an eyesore. "The woods and copses were more like tips – strewn with abandoned household items. The hedgerows were littered with plastic and paper. It's fly-tipping on an almost industrial scale."'  

 

There has already been a huge amount written about the exhibition online, but I've noticed that some reviewers omit to mention the room devoted to Hockney's versions of a landscape by Claude, The Sermon on the Mount (c. 1656). These come as a bit of a surprise, hung between all those images of the arrival of spring in Woldgate and a darkened seating area where you can experience the Yorkshire Wolds through two grids of video screens, showing footage taken from the bonnet of Hockney's jeep.  Charles Darwent in The Independent could 'see why Hockney would be fascinated by Claude Lorrain, who, like him, invented a light that was more real than real. But his computer-cleaned takes on Claude's Sermon on the Mount are just appalling: it is as well that the dead cannot sue.'  Brian Sewell in The Evening Standard complained that 'Hockney is not another Turner expressing, in high seriousness, his debt to the old master' and described Hockney's engagement with The Sermon on the Mount as 'a sickening impertinence, contemptible.'  I would agree that he doesn't seem very reverential: you can't help thinking that Hockney's figures (elongated like Claude's) are climbing the Mount in order to dive into the swimming pool coloured sea beyond.  In an article for The Economist Karen Wright recounts her meetings with David Hockney over the last few years and recalls being shown his vast painting after Claude as a work-in-progress. 'It fills the entire wall, about 15ft high and 40ft wide, and the colours are eye-popping: there are fields of jacaranda purple in the background, and the sea has been lightened to a soft, milky, opalescent blue. ... As we leave the “Sermon” behind, he says, “I have named it ‘The Bigger Message’,” and he laughs uproariously.'

The coast line of spring slowly emerges

Here at winter's edge

The coast line of spring

Slowly emerges

And the harsh cliffs of March

Carve themselves upwards from

Gales of granite

And winds of stone... 

These are the first lines of 'Spring' by Ronald Duncan, one of the poems set to electronic music on The Seasons (1969), a strange and rare album originally made to accompany BBC Schools Radio's Drama Workshop series.  The record has just been reissued by Johnny Trunk, who describes finding his copy in Tunbridge Wells in the late 1990s. 'Several people in my small circle of peculiar musical chums also came across it, and by the mid naughties it was coming across as a major influence on retro futurism and the new fangled scene they named hauntology. This comes as no surprise as the album has several layers and levels to it; it is weird, spooky, unsettling, very British, has an unusual whiff of childhood to some, it comes scattered with pregnant language and is full of unexpected metaphors, pagan oddness, folk cadences and insane noises. Does it get any better? Considering this was an LP made for children’s education and improvised dance, I think not.' 

If you think the landscape described in 'Spring' sounds slightly forbidding for use in schools, have a listen to 'October' (above): 'Like severed hands the wet leaves lie / flat on the deserted avenue...' Adam Harper in Wire magazine describes Duncan's verse as 'adult, disconcertingly pagan and fatalistically depressive, teeming with bizarre metaphors and personifications: "When winter whips, old men discover their life is a dream they can't remember", and "The sun bleeds on the horizon till the day, like a fallow deer is bled and the light is devoured and the lake is dead".  When not aggressively melancholy, the register is madly affirmative, as if looking back through cavorting medieval bumpkins clutching crumhorns and terrified Druids.'  Ronald Duncan turned his hand to many kinds of writing but lived in Devon and wrote about the countryside in his first book, Journal of a Husbandman (1944).  In the sixties his work encompassed experimental work (O—B—A—F—G: A Play in One Act for Stereophonic Sound, 1964), the script for Girl on a Motorcycle (1968) and two rather misanthropic-sounding volumes of autobiography All Men Are Islands (1964) and How to Make Enemies (1968).

In addition to Duncan's poems and the Radiophonic Workshop accompaniment of David Cain (who has been interviewed about his music by Ghost Box's Julian House), this record originally came with the option of using a set of slides - visual images of the four seasons - which could be ordered from the BBC for an additional 15s. Detective work in the BBC archives revealed the names of the artists involved and Johnny Trunk was able to track down one of them, Judith Bromley, who still possessed the original slides.  Her painting for winter shows water and brown reeds, in a scene very similar to the photographs I was taking outside the Britten Studio at Snape recently (Benjamin Britten actually worked with Ronald Duncan, who helped write the last scene of Peter Grimes).  The depiction of spring is a more abstract view of burgeoning life, with leaves twisting upwards in shades of yellow like the sunlight in childhood photographs.  It is reproduced in the CD booklet next to Duncan's poem for 'March' and, again, one wonders what children were supposed to make of something like this: 'The Earth is sleeping, who will wake her? / Let the rusty ploughshare take / Strength from her thighs...'  The sexual imagery continues until the end: 'The Earth is ready, who will take her? / The Earth's a woman.  Time will take her.'

Mountainous Valley with Fenced Fields

Werner Herzog has been invited to exhibit at the Whitney Biennial this year and, as you can see from the short interview above, he will be mounting an installation devoted to a landscape painter whom 'nobody knows': Hercules Segers.  In 1678 Samuel van Hoogstraten, writing forty years or so after the death of Segers, characterised him as an artist unrecognised by his contemporaries. 'According to him Segers's despair over his failure to achieve success drove him to drink and he died after falling downstairs while drunk' (Seymour Slive, Dutch Painting, 1600-1800).  But Segers did achieve some degree of fame in his day - one of his works was offered to the King of Denmark for example - and Rembrandt owned eight of his paintings.  There is an etching by Rembrandt of the Flight into Egypt (c1653) which he made by scraping away the figures of Tobias and the Angel and keeping the poetic landscape in a plate Segers had made (Segers himself had copied an engraving by Hendrick Goudt which was in turn based on an original painting by Adam Elsheimer...)  Nevertheless, according to Slive, few Dutch painters who came after Segers 'explored the haunting world he discovered, and only Rembrandt and Jacob van Ruisdael evoke moods similar to his.'

Rembrandt, Flight into Egypt, c1635

Etching reworked on Segers' plate

Paintings by Hercules Segers (note that his name is often spelt Seghers) are rare.  Only about a dozen were known and one imaginary landscape thought by some to be by him was destroyed in a fire five years ago.  His prints are more numerous and include intriguing studies of a skull and a pile of books.  Characteristic features of his landscape etchings, according to Slive, are 'lonely, lunar-like rocks and decayed pine trees.  His vigorous and somewhat grainy line is well suited to suggest weather-worn surfaces of rocks and ruins.  A crumbling edifice which reminds viewers of the transitory nature of their life and accomplishments was one of his favourite motifs.'   According to Hoogstraten, Segers 'printed paintings' and this is evident, for example, in the landscape below, where Segers pulled the sheet of paper through the printing press with a piece of cloth to giving it the feel of a painting on canvas.  He would create a set of radically different impressions from the same plate using different inks and unusual effects, cropping his prints like a modern photographer. Werner Herzog's installation, Hearsay of the Soul, will feature twenty of these etchings, projected to the accompaniment of music by Ernst Reijseger (who composed the soundtrack for Cave of Forgotten Dreams).

Hercules Segers, Mountainous Valley with Fenced Fields, c1620-30

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Place: Taking the Waters

Reeds at Snape, Sunday morning

As promised last time, here are a few thoughts prompted by a weekend of reflections on water.  First onto the stage at Snape Maltings was Robert Macfarlane, who recalled how reading Roger Deakin's Waterlog had opened up a whole new aspect of the landscape for him, as well as raising wider questions about how to live.  The talk began with a recording of Deakin swimming in his moat and describing his frog's eye view of the water.  Macfarlane recalled his visits to Walnut Tree Farm, seeing Deakin relaxing in an old bath full of water that had been warmed over the course of day by the simple action of sunlight on a hose.  We liked the idea of Deakin raking out a maze from the autumn leaves for Macfarlane's young daughter to play in.  I'm afraid Mrs Plinius got the giggles when the unflattering pair of Speedos Deakin was wearing in one photograph were referred to by Macfarlane as 'a banana hammock.'  Deakin's achievement was to to combine a sense of rootedness with a wide ranging curiosity about the world; for Macfarlane he seemed to have resolved the tension between settling and moving which has troubled other nature writers like Edward Thomas.  He was, Macfarlane said, like a compass, with its base planted in Suffolk and the other point tracing a long sequence of journeys across the watery landscape.

The sea at Aldeburgh, Sunday morning

   
Jules Pretty was on next, describing his walks round the The Luminous Coast of East Anglia.  In this liminal zone, where the position of the coast shifts and changes during the course of the day, he encountered a two mile collective art work in the form of sea wall covered in graffiti, an old tip gradually eroding to reveal the detritus of Victorian London and fishermen's cottages on the North Norfolk coast whose windows all point inland away from the sea.  One ten day walk left him with the vision from one eye faded like an old photograph.  'I felt I was carrying an imprint of the sun holding position somewhere slightly behind my right eye. I had headed east, north, occasionally west inland and east again, and so the light was almost always ahead or off to starboard. It left me with an imbalance, and a sense that the whole world was luminous on one side. As dark clouds raced over the water it turned slate grey and menacing. But when the sun came out again, the water became a shimmering mix of silver and mercury, and I was lit from below as well as above.'

Ken Worpole, Saturday afternoon

Ken Worpole's talk, '350 Miles - the Essex Coast', drew on the short book of that title he wrote with photographer Jason Orton (a collaboration he characterised as a form of parallel play), and on his essay 'East of Eden' for the anthology Towards Re-Enchantment: Place and its Meanings.  The whole PLACE event was partly a continuation of this earlier Re-Enchantment Project (last year, we were in the same hall listening to talks on landscape and W. G. Sebald, including Robert Macfarlane on the wild places of Essex).  In an earlier post I mentioned one of Orton's photographs of a solid brick church with 'an uncanny correspondence between some of these austere church buildings, with their minimal window apertures, and the fortified military buildings in and around the coast.'  In his talk on Saturday, Worpole dwelled on the way the coast has been a key symbolic site for religious belief, from 'Dover Beach' to Don Cupitt's The Sea of Faith.  He showed an interesting photograph of a religious congregation meeting on the beach at Southend, which reminded me of the shore sermons of Gotthard Ludwig Kosegarten and their link to Caspar David Friedrich's painting of a Monk by the Sea.

David Rothenberg playing with Beluga whales

The rest of the afternoon was devoted to the sea itself: David Rothenberg played along to field recordings of waves and whales, Jay Griffiths read from the sea section of Wild, and Olivia Chaney performed some sea-related songs.  We also saw The Forgotten Space, a long film ('agit-prop', not art, according to co-director Noel Burch, who introduced it) about the effects of globalisation on the sea and the people who live and work in the vicinity of the great ports at Los Angeles, Rotterdam and Hong Kong. Watching an interview with an Indonesian sailor in his cabin, I wondered how Gary Snyder (who worked as a seaman in the fifties) would write about these vast container ships.  The 'seafarers' at a sailor's retreat in Hong Kong, built by British Christians in the days of empire, were all croupiers on the local casino ships, moored permanently offshore. There is striking footage of a Piranesi-like tower in Hong Kong, with container lorries circling endlessly upwards through the petrol fumes (ventilation would have been too expensive to install), and scenes of Rotterdam's robot trucks moving the containers around in an unfathomable sequence, with one human operative sitting alone in his tower.  The film explores the consequences of Rotterdam's expansion, from the construction of a freight-only train line through the crowded landscape of the Netherlands, to the alienation of port workers, like the man (not very old) who recalls wistfully how differently it had been when he first started working on his parents' barge.  Meanwhile, Antwerp is being developed as a rival to Rotterdam and we are shown the dilapidated village of Doel, set for demolition, the dike that protected it from the sea no defence against the tide of global capital.

The Forgotten Space.

From the industrial sublime to the faintly ridiculous: Saturday evening saw a work-in-progress presentation of Swandown, in which Andrew Kötting and Iain Sinclair 'pursue a suitably English voyage into the heart of place and politics' by 'taking a swan pedalo from Hastings beach to Hackney’s Olympic site via the South Coast, the inland waterways of Kent and the Thames estuary'.  There was a lot of joking around on stage but Iain Sinclair was allowed to be a bit highbrow in introducing the film extracts and duly made a connection between them and those recurring Modernist myths of the Odyssey and the Wasteland.  He talked about a recording of Basil Bunting, reading from Pound's Cantos, which he had lost and then been reunited with.  I thought of the post on Bunting and Pound I wrote here only a few weeks ago; Sinclair's method of making these cultural connections across a landscape or on a journey sometimes feels like a form of hyperlinking.

 Swandown snippets

It is hard to tell what the finished film will be like but there should be some amusing moments: a pedalo encounter with a UKBA motor launch, for instance, and the moment when a real swan attacks their fake one, knocking its head off.  My wife has always found Iain Sinclair "too blokeish" for her taste and didn't think much of a scene in which our heroes peddle their pedalo impassively past a drowned Ophelia, her white dress spreading on the waters like the wings of a swan.  The soundtrack to Swandown promises to be good though - put together by Jem Finer, whose time-lapse film of an ancient beech wood, Still, was installed in an upstairs room for the day.  As the extracts from Swandown were screened, he sat behind his laptop controlling various sound effects, accompanied by photographer Anonymous Bosch, whilst Sinclair, Kötting and singer Kirsten Norrie did their thing on stage.  The other member of the team, Kristin O'Donnell (Ophelia), walked on and lay down silently among the plastic swans.

Reeds at Snape, Sunday morning

PLACE: Taking the Waters resumed on Sunday, the eighteenth anniversary of Derek Jarman's death, with a showing of The Garden (1990) - a film I last saw many years ago at the ICA in London (with a rather different audience).  I can think of river films that might have flowed more readily together with the day's talks - William Raban's Thames Film for example - but it was nonetheless nice to see again Jarman's tinted, sped-up and slowed-down images of the beach and skies at Dungeness.  I had forgotten scenes like the Zéro de conduite style pillow-fight, re-staged on an iron-framed bed in which Jarman seems to be dreaming his own film.  The floating white feathers were a Sinclairesque connection to Swandown and my mind wandered on from this to Jean Vigo's other great film, L'Atalante, set on a working barge long before the coming of the containers.

Derek Jarman's The Garden extract

 

Swans and barges would appear again in the final three talks of the day.  Manu Luksch presented footage from her recent Kayak Libre project, in which she set up a water taxi service on London's canal system and recorded the thoughts of her passengers. One day she saw the body of swan floating by and found then that stories of dead swans kept coming up.  Simon Read showed a painting of the barge that he had brought over from Holland in 1980, at a time when the Dutch government was trying to clear the canals of unnecessary traffic.  He paints large maps of the shifting shorelands and sketches the potential impact of flood water and estuarine development in a style reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci.  Finally, the day's last journey was in another barge: down river to the mouth of the Thames.  Estuary is a film by James Price with texts read by Rachel Lichtenstein, originally shown at a similar arts festival in Southend last year, Shorelines.  These landscape-themed events seem to be becoming increasingly popular, and the hope is that PLACE will become an annual event.

Estuary, filmed by James Price

I think the best way to end this post is with Joseph Conrad's The Mirror of the Sea and a description of the Thames that was mentioned in Ken Worpole's talk and used at the start of Estuary.

'In the widening of the shores sinking low in the gray, smoky distances the greatness of the sea receives the mercantile fleet of good ships that London sends out upon the turn of every tide. They follow each other, going very close by the Essex shore. Such as the beads of a rosary told by business-like shipowners for the greater profit of the world they slip one by one into the open: while in the offing the inward-bound ships come up singly and in bunches from under the sea horizon closing the mouth of the river between Orfordness and North Foreland. They all converge upon the Nore, the warm speck of red upon the tones of drab and gray, with the distant shores running together towards the west, low and flat, like the sides of an enormous canal. The sea-reach of the Thames is straight, and, once Sheerness is left behind, its banks seem very uninhabited, except for the cluster of houses which is Southend, or here and there a lonely wooden jetty where petroleum ships discharge their dangerous cargoes, and the oil-storage tanks, low and round with slightly-domed roofs, peep over the edge of the fore-shore, as it were a village of Central African huts imitated in iron.  Bordered by the black and shining mud-flats, the level marsh extends for miles.  Away in the far background the land rises, closing the view with a continuous wooded slope, forming in the distance an interminable rampart overgrown with bushes.'

A View of the Untersberg

In an earlier post I considered two examples of visual poetry in which words are placed on the page to convey the impression of a landscape: Guillaume Apollinaire's 'Paysage' (1918) and Guillermo de Torre's 'Paisaje Plastico' (1919).  These Modernist experiments are one source for the many kinds of visual poetry that have emerged since the 1950s, but another much older tradition is the shaped poem, whose most famous English exponent was George Herbert ('Easter Wings').  Montaigne was not a fan of this kind of thing - poems in 'the shapes of eggs, globes, wings, and hatchets' feature in his essay 'On Vain Subtleties'.  But the fact that 'shaped poems have usually been considered clever, fussy tricks at best' did not deter the American poet John Hollander from publishing a whole collection of them, Types of Shape (1969, expanded 1991).  To produce poems that would be more than just momentarily amusing, Hollander aimed to translate his objects into striking typographical silhouettes whilst ensuring that the poem would work as a poem even if the shape were destroyed and the lines printed all flush to the left.  The example below (and I hope my photo is sufficiently grainy to avoid copyright issues) is called 'A view of the Untersberg'. 

The poem's subtitle provides a more precise location and places it in the sub-genre of window view poems: 'Elev. 6,000 ft., SW of Salzburg, as seen through a window in Schloß Leopoldskron.'  I can't help recalling that the one time I went to Salzburg it rained all week and the view from the window would have been adequately represented by Apollinaire's visual poem 'Il Pleut'.  Hollander was obviously luckier with the weather and he provides an accurate description of the mountain's shape (see for example, the image here).  It is possible to imagine a far larger visual poem that would imitate not just the outline but also the structure of the mountain, with spaces for its patches of snow, or an even more ambitious poem in which every path and tree would be discernible...   'A View of the Untersberg' starts at the summit (with a reference to the etymology of 'Untersberg'): 'I / stand / high on what / was once Odins / mound of power...'  And it ends with the poet back down on the plain 'at the bottom of the day', haunted by mountain ghosts and feeling 'changed by having been on that unreal height'.  

Next on Some Landscapes: reflections on PLACE: Taking the Waters, a landscape-themed event this weekend which is due to feature Noel Burch, Jay Griffiths, Robert Macfarlane, Olivia Chaney, Jules Pretty, David Rothenberg, Ken Worpole, Jem Finer, Andrew Kötting, Iain Sinclair, Ben Eastop, Rachel Lichtenstein, Manu Luksch and Simon Read.

Earth-life painting

Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869) published his Nine Letters on Landscape Painting in 1830, prefaced by a letter from Goethe suggesting that they 'will delight both artists and amateurs by opening their eyes to the manifold associative harmonies within nature.'  They are probably best known today for their emphasis on the importance of science and the study of nature, although this is only apparent in the later letters, the first five being closer in spirit to Caspar David Friedrich, whom Carus knew and admired.  Carus apparently started work on the letters in 1815 and sent the early ones to Goethe in 1822 - they took so long to compose because he was busy in these years publishing scientific research and working as a doctor and medical professor, as well as doing some landscape painting on the side.  Their addressee was 'Ernst', named in remembrance of the three year old son Carus lost to scarlet fever in 1816.  In his preface to the first edition Carus wrote that 'amid earnest endeavours and onerous duties of many kinds, art has been a true friend and silent comforter.'

Carus coined a new term for the kind of art he wanted to see: 'earth-life painting' (Erdlebenbild).  Like many subsequent artists, he found the word 'landscape' too restrictive - 'trivial and inadequate'.  Carus urged artists to study the 'physiognomy' of landscape and 'learn to speak the language of nature.'  What was really needed to help them was a book that would 'present earth life to the reader in all of its many aspects' and indeed Carus himself eventually wrote such a book (Twelve Letters on Earth-life, 1841).  Carus obviously found it hard when writing his Nine Letters on Landscape Painting to point to examples of artists who were engaged in a version of earth-life painting.  Instead he turned to literature: Goethe's poetry, Humboldt's Views of Nature, and a book on mushrooms by 'the excellent Nees von Esenbeck.  Read what he says on autumnal vegetation, and you will find that pure knowledge of nature, artistically formed, turns of its own accord into the noblest poetry.'

Johan Christian Dahl, Norwegian Mountain Landscape, 1819

It was only in 1833 that Carus finally identified an earth-life painter, a young artist whose work exceeded the best landscapes of Ruisdael... George Heinrich Crola.  (No, me neither... Apparently Crola was a protegé of Friedrich and Johan Christian Dahl, who moved to Munich and became a specialist in trees and woodland subjects).  It is perhaps surprising that Carus had not already described Dahl himself (with his evident interest in geology) as an earth-life painter, as Oskar Bätschmann points out in his introduction to the Getty reprint of Nine Letters. Carus continued to paint himself, although his work continued to show the strong influence of Friedrich, as can be seen below in the imaginary memorial to Goethe, who died in 1832.  Bätschmann calls this a 'mystical "earth-life painting" in which the music of the spheres, the harmony of the cosmos, presides over the harmonious complementarity of geological and minerological interests.'

Carl Gustav Carus, Goethe Memorial, 1832

I'll end this post with a painting in words, one of several 'Fragments from a Painter's Journal' that Carus appended to his last Letter as examples of 'the way in which a moment in nature may be instantly apprehended as a finished picture.' The view was 'taken' at 5 o'clock in Dresden's Großer Garten one day in February 1823 and it is a scene very reminiscent of the conditions outside today, with cold winter light and patches of frozen snow:

The sun had gone down; against the dull yellow sunset sky, a wide band of gray snow cloud, uniform in tone, extended down to the horizon; in the bluish sky above, scattered cumulus clouds still caught the light of the departed sun.  The distant view was shrouded in brownish, greenish, and finally violet tones.  Streaks of snow, lighter than the gray cloud but darker than the light sky, punctuated the dark surface of the ground.

In the foreground, on the edge of the moat, two massive, ancient willows stretched out their gaunt branches, nearly black; around their trunks the snow had thawed and then refrozen, so that, close to the strong dark tone of the tree trunks, a sparkling light reflected the bright sky; it was lighter than anything else in the foreground, for even the jagged ice on the frozen pool could be seen only by subdued light.

The Song of the Flame-Red Lobster

On a recent edition of The Freakier Zone, Professor Justin Spear introduced Radio 6 listeners to an 'armful of groovy soundtracks with a swinging psychedelic slant'.  One of these was made to accompany a 1966 Swedish arthouse film called Oj Oj Oj eller sången om den eldröda hummern ('Well well well, or the Song of the Flame-Red Lobster') directed by Torbjörn Axelman.  As you can see from the clip above, this involved the creation of a vast abstract painting on a frozen lake by a man in a suit running around and firing paint bombs.

Alps on Alps arise!

Ferdinand Hodler, Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau above a sea of fog, 1908

Source: Wikimedia Commons

A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Fir'd at first Sight with what the Muse imparts,
In fearless Youth we tempt the Heights of Arts,
While from the bounded Level of our Mind,
Short Views we take, nor see the lengths behind,
But more advanc'd, behold with strange Surprize
New, distant Scenes of endless Science rise!
So pleas'd at first, the towring Alps we try,
Mount o'er the Vales, and seem to tread the Sky;
Th' Eternal Snows appear already past,
And the first Clouds and Mountains seem the last:
But those attain'd, we tremble to survey
The growing Labours of the lengthen'd Way,
Th' increasing Prospect tires our wandering Eyes,
Hills peep o'er Hills, and Alps on Alps arise!

These days I find it easy to appreciate the sentiments in this extended landscape metaphor from Pope's 'An Essay on Criticism' (1709).  Among those Heights of Arts that I tackled in fearless Youth, one of the most daunting was Ezra Pound's Cantos. Basil Bunting once compared them to the Alps in a memorable short poem, which you can hear Bunting reading at the Poetry Archive.  Trying to penetrate the Cantos, Bunting says, is like trying to make sense of the mountains: 'who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it is smoothing?'  Pound himself, in a section of the ABC of Reading entitled 'COMPASS, SEXTANT, OR LAND MARKS', advises the reader to 'brace himself' for a list of the great writers - 'the minimum that a man would have to read if he hoped to know what a given new book was worth' - and uses another Alpine metaphor to describe a knowledge of the classics of literature: 'a man who has climbed the Matterhorn may prefer Derbyshire to Switzerland but he won't think the Peak is the highest mountain in Europe.'

John Ruskin, The Matterhorn, 1849

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Trees into logs into smoke

Last night I watched Michelangelo Frammartino's film Le Quattro Volte on DVD and have been boring people all day trying to convince them how wonderful it is.  Reviewing it last year in The Independent, Jonathan Romney wrote that Le Quattro Volte 'will set you musing on matters natural and metaphysical, using little more than some Calabrian hillsides, a stack of logs, some snails and a herd of goats – and barely a syllable of dialogue. The film is an extraordinary achievement – beautiful, moving, mysterious, and, at times, extremely funny. In its self-effacing way, it's nothing short of a miracle – one of those rare works that break all the rules about what cinema "should" be in order to demonstrate what it can be.'  He goes on to explain that 'the title – literally, the four "turns"or "phases" – refers to the world as described by Pythagorean philosophy, with its theory of a cycle of eternal transformation and reincarnation. What this means in practice is that Le Quattro Volte isn't about story, or character, or even action. Rather, this is a contemplative film about things changing into other things – like trees into logs into smoke – and about the cycle of natural changes, the internal clock by which the universe keeps time.'

 

In an interview for the DVD, Frammartino said, "I've tried to make the landscape the protagonist.  I tried not to use it simply as background but to make it become something more important, to bring it out and elevate it to the level of protagonist.  For example, in the film there's a moment in the first part, when our protagonist is still a man, an old shepherd.  He's lying in the grass minding his own business when an ant starts walking over his face, over his cheekbones and up towards his eyes.  The ant steals the scene and the man's face, in close-up, becomes a landscape.  There's this reversal of roles.  And then, a few scenes later, there's a landscape with the roofs of the village and a big tree emerging, the protagonist of the scene, with a little man climbing up it, as tiny as an ant.  The man is like an insect and the landscape reminds us of a man's face.  This game, this shifting of levels, which can provoke laughter, I've tried to employ it in the relationship between close-up and landscape, this game of scale, this reversal of importance."

Water flows inward underneath a cottonwood tree

In the video clip embedded above the environmental philosopher David Abram talks about the way landscape no longer speaks directly to us.  In his book The Spell of the Sensuous, he writes that in oral cultures, ‘human eyes and ears have not yet shifted their synaesthetic participation from the animate surroundings to the written word.  Particular mountains, canyons, streams, boulder-strewn fields, or groves of trees have not yet lost the expressive potency and dynamism with which they spontaneously present themselves to the sense.  A particular place in the land is never, for an oral culture, just a passive or inert setting for the human events that occur there.  It is an active participant in those occurrences.’  These conclusions come after a description of the importance of location for Western Apache storytelling.  An ‘agodzaahi narrative always begins and ends with a statement explaining where it happened, using one of the language’s evocative place names (which read like compressed poems).  Abram cites the work of linguistic anthropologist Keith Basso, who found that these place names occur with remarkable frequency in Apache discourse.  I was intrigued by this, so I looked up the original Basso article (in Cultural Anthropology, May 1988), where photographs of specific locations are reproduced to demonstrate how well their Apache place names fit: “Water flows inward underneath a cottonwood tree”; “White rocks lie above in a compact cluster”; “Water flows down on top of a regular succession of flat rocks.”

According to Basso, ‘the great majority of Western Apache place names currently in use are believed to have been created long ago by the “ancestors” (nohwizá’ yé) of the Apache people.  The ancestors, who had to travel constantly in search of food, covered vast amounts of territory and needed to be able to remember and discuss many different locations.  This was facilitated by the invention of hundreds of descriptive place names that were intended to depict their referents in close and exact detail.’  What's particularly interesting about these names (for readers of this blog) is that they assume a specific point of view, like a landscape:  'Western Apache place names provide more than precise depictions of the sites to which the names may be used to refer.  In addition, place names implicitly identify positions for viewing these locations: optimal vantage points, so to speak, from which the sites can be observed, clearly and unmistakably, just as their names depict them.  To picture a site from its name, then, requires that one imagine it as if standing or sitting at a particular spot, and it is to these privileged positions, Apaches say, that the images evoked by place names cause them to travel in their minds.’ This travel is both “forward” (bidááh) into space, and, following the memory of their ancestors' wanderings, “backward” (t’ aazhi’) into time.

Some wine beside the white clouds

Landscape can be a solace to the exile, but it can be hard to contemplate the beauty of lakes and mountains without thinking of home, or the bitter circumstances and long journey that have led from there.  When the An Lu-shan rebellion broke out in 756, the poet Li Po travelled south to Kiukiang to escape the turmoil and fighting.  There he made an ill-fated decision to join Prince Lin, the Emperor's sixteenth son, whose flotilla was making its way down the Yangtze.  Instead of heading off to fight the rebels, Prince Lin was aiming to set up his own independent regime.  According to Arthur Waley (in The Poetry and Career of Li Po) it seems unlikely that the rather unworldly Li Po knew what the Prince intended - he would later claim to have been virtually kidnapped: "I allowed myself to be deceived by false pretences and was forced by threats to go on board a transport."  At the time though, he wrote poems like 'Watching the dancing-girls at a banquet on board Marshal Wei's transport; written while with the Fleet', indicating that he was thoroughly enjoying himself on this adventure.  This pleasant time came to an end near Yangchow, where Prince Lin's forces were met by government troops and his generals abandoned him - Li Po probably jumped ship as well at this point (the prince was captured and executed).  On his return to Kiukiang, Li Po was arrested as a traitor and imprisoned for several months.  After being set free he made his way to Wu-ch'ang, near Hankow, where he stayed for a while, hoping for a pardon, before continuing again, north, to Yo-chou, near the famous Tung-t'ing (Dong-ting) Lake.  There he met two friends, both exiles like himself.  Chia Chih was a writer (he had actually composed the Emperor's deed of abdication in 756) and former Governor of Ju-chou who had been demoted after being judged to have fled south from the rebels too hastily. Li Yeh was a relative of Li Po's, banished to the south after being charged with perverting the course of justice.  One day, the three friends decided to take an evening boating excursion on the lake...

Hermit Fisherman on Lake Dong-ting, Wu Zhen, 14th century

'The bright moon, the autumn wind / the waters of Lake Dong-ting, / a lone swan, the falling leaves, a tiny skiff.'  Thus Chia Chih conveys the beauty and the underlying sadness of the occasion.  In his Anthology of Chinese Literature Stephen Owen provides translations of the poems that resulted from this outing.  Li Po 'wrote a series of five of his most famous quatrains celebrating the beauty of the moment.'  But Chia Chih's are 'every bit as memorable.  Both poets called to mind echoes of exile and death beyond the edges of the vast lake, places like Chang-sha, where the Han intellectual Jia Yi was banished.' Li Po imagines riding the currents in the water up into the night sky and buying 'some wine / beside the white clouds.'  In the centre of the lake there is a mountain called Jun-shan (the source for one of China's ten famous teas) which Li Po pictures on a 'mirror of jade' - the 'bright lake, swept calm and clear.'  Chia Chih describes more turbulent waters, swollen with autumn floods.  The friends let the waves guide their light boat, 'no care whether near or far.'

So in eight short poems we have a record of an evening in the autumn of 759, a moment of reflection before events, like waves on the lake, swept these men up again.  Climbing Pa-ch'iu Shan that autumn, Li Po glimpsed another fleet mustering and wrote in one of his poems of the rebel forces approaching Lake Tung-t'ing.  It was only near the end of the year that peace was restored to the Yangtze region and the poet was finally able to leave, making for Wu-ch'ang where he again expressed his hopes of one day being given a posting back in the capital.  But by this time Li Po knew that any such post would be his last.  He fell ill while traveling to Nanking and in 762 made his final journey to see the great calligrapher, Li Yang-ping near T'ai-p'ing.  Meanwhile Chia Chih had also made his way back and, a year later, on the accession of Emperor Tai-tsung, regained his former position, going on to serve as Vice Minister of War before his death in 772.  Li Po seems to have died at the home of Li Yang-ping, to whom the poet entrusted what writings he still had after his years of wandering in exile.  According to the well known story, he took another nighttime boat excursion, and this time, drunk on wine, fell into the river and drowned whilst trying to embrace the reflection of the moon.

Note: As always the sources vary in spelling Chinese words and here I've generally stuck to the older Wade-Giles system - for me the poet will always be Li Po rather than Li Bai.  The pinyin version of Chia Chih is Jia Zhi.  As noted above, Lake Tung-t'ing is now generally called Lake Dong-ting.

Edgelands

The Fitzwilliam museum in Cambridge is going to mount a small exhibition later this year, showing prints by two of the artists mentioned in Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts' book Edgelands. 'George Shaw's series, Twelve Short Walks, 2005, is drawn from revisited scenes of his childhood on the Tile Hill council estate in the suburbs of Coventry. Michael Landy's Nourishment, 2002, features life-sized images of weeds, or 'street-flowers' - the overlooked and neglected vegetation of Edgelands.'  Shaw's Humbrol-painted views (which made him the favourite to win last year's Turner Prize) and Landy's equally painstaking illustrations of groundsel, toadflax and thale cress represent two different approaches to the edgelands - one an attempt to depict the visual experience of these elusive, marginal spaces, the other an investigation into a particular defining feature: electricity pylons, cooling towers, sheds, containers, litter.

Among the artists who, like George Shaw, convey a sense of the actual landscape, there is David Rayson, who has executed a set of canal path paintings, From Ashmore Park to Wednesfield, where 'there are no people about, just their traces in the old leaden water, the missing railing, the litter...'  Then there are the motorway verges that Edward Chell has made the focus for his paintings, even going so far as to exhibit them in Little Chefs.  And there are the photographs Keith Arnatt made after leaving behind performance art in the early seventies: Abandoned Landscapes, A.O.N.B., The Forest.  In the tradition of Samuel Palmer's detailed jewel-like images, Arnatt has made a series of 'polythene Palmers' - colour images of a rubbish-strewn path, Miss Grace's Lane.  But unsurprisingly it is easier to name artists who have chosen to isolate details, like Michael Landy's weeds, than show a wider prospect, since the edgelands tend to fail to live up to even our post-industrial ideas of the picturesque. 

Of course some parts of the edgelands have themselves been landscaped, as Farley and Symmons Roberts observe of a new university campus and various retail sites and housing estates.  They visit an East Midlands business park where 'shrubs and flowers don't just decorate perimeters, they read like spreadsheets.  Thriving businesses have bigger teams of gardeners' and one software company has a lake surrounded by bulrushes.  At this point, after a digression on poets and the sub-genre of deer roadkill poems, the authors imagine a wild stag wandering into the business park and ask 'Who would notice? Who would write the poem?' Well, why not one of those software company employees, I wondered.  This was one of those moments where the authors seemed to look down on the inhabitants of the landscape rather like eighteenth century tourists (as Robert Macfarlane noted in his review).  But aside from that, Edgelands is an engrossing read, scattered with memorable images - like the railway embankment (to pick just one example) which they compare to a glacier, its litter 'caught like till in the ice, inching slowly towards earth with the general tumble of each season's growth.'  I also find it impossible not to like a book that references Mark E. Smith's magnificent (and overtly misanthropic) 'Container Drivers'...  on which note I'll end this post, playing out with the mighty Fall: '... Look at a car park for two days / Look at a grey port for two days / Train line, stone and grey / RO-RO roll on roll off...'

Apocalypse

John Martin, The Bard, c1817

As the Tate Britain exhibition John Martin: Apocalypse comes to the end of its run, it would be interesting to know how well it has done.  There was talk beforehand of the way that Martin's critical reputation has risen and that his spectacular paintings should appeal in a world of 'proliferating IMAX cinemas and giant plasmas' (Ian Christie in Tate Etc. magazine) and contemporary photography framed on a Sublime scale - Edward Burtynsky, Florian Maier-Aichen, Andreas Gursky (Jonathan Griffin also in Tate Etc.)  The Tate's familiar Last Judgement Triptych was accompanied by a new 'theatrical display' intended to evoke the way these paintings were seen around the world in the late nineteenth century.  Looking round the exhibition I found it easy to see why John Martin's work has been mocked - "huge, queer and tawdry" was the verdict of William Makepeace Thackeray.

Martin's shortcomings are more evident when you see the paintings up close: The Bard for example often gets reproduced in books about Romanticism but I'd not previously been able to see how unconvincing some of its details are - Edward I's army a line of little tin soldiers trailing all the way back to the castle gate.  Yet there's still something awesome about these blockbuster paintings (at least that's what the adolescent Chris Foss fan I used to be was telling me) and the exhibition was also fascinating for the way it highlighted Martin's less well known activities - as a decorator of plates, an illustrator of prehistoric creatures (Gideon Mantell's The Wonders of Geology) and a painter of modest topographical water colours, like some views of Richmond Park where, like Edmund Spenser in Ireland, he had an oak tree named after him (how many writers and artists are commemorated in this way I wonder?)

Perhaps the most surprising exhibits were two examples of his schemes to improve the city of London.  The first, which might have been drawn by a 1970s land artist or a 1990s psychogeographer, was his plan for a London Connecting Railway - a beautiful curving form superimposed on a map, like the outline of an octopus.   The other was a drawing of a sewer housed in a new Thames embankment, stretching from 'the Ranelagh Outlet to the Engine Station': a proposal considered seriously at the time but easy to view as one more facet of Martin's capacity to dream up imaginary cities. (It made me think of today's urban explorers, uncovering tunnels like these and scaling buildings to view the city below from a John Martin perspective.)  An excellent article in The Guardian by the John Martin expert William Feaver mentions these engineering projects and claims that Martin 'was ecologically prophetic. In his 1833 A Plan for Improving the Air and Water of the Metropolis he raised an issue such as had been dismissed by the scoffers who ignored divine warnings and were swept away in Noah's flood: "Is it not probable that a too ignorant waste of manure has caused the richest and most fertile countries such as Egypt, Assyria, the Holy Land, the South of Italy etc to become barren as they now are?"'

John Martin, Pandemonium, 1841

The Dawning of Music in Kentucky

I recently came upon a nice short essay by Kyle Gann called 'American Romanticism: Music vs. Painting'.  It discusses nineteenth century music in relation to the paintings of artists like Frederic Edwin Church and Martin Johnson Heade, mentioning in particular three early orchestral works inspired by landscapes: 'The Ornithological Combat of Kings (1836) by Anthony Philip Heinrich (1781-1861), the Niagara Symphony (1854, though it doesn’t seem to have been performed before the current decade) by William Henry Fry (1813-1864), and Night in the Tropics (1861) by Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869). All three were based on New World subject matter – South or Central America in Heinrich’s and Gottschalk’s cases, like so many of Church’s and Heade’s best paintings. All three offer effects unknown to European music of the time – particularly Gottschalk’s pop-music syncopations and the rumble of eleven timpani with which Fry evokes Niagara’s cascade. All three are marked by a technical ineptitude that any sensitive amateur could pinpoint – Heinrich’s marching-band momentum badly needs a rest now and then, Gottschalk’s harmonic rhythm is deadeningly predictable, and Fry lapses into Wagnerian banality whenever he’s not being onomatapoetically athematic. They seem today like brave but Quixotic figures, would-be heroes whom the passage of time reduces to clowns.'

Frederick Edwin Church, Niagara Falls, 1857

Anthony Philip Heinrich is a particularly interesting figure: a Bohemian wholesale dealer in linen, thread, wine, and other goods who settled in America and only decided to take up music after the failure of his business and death of his wife.  According to David Barron, he travelled to Kentucky and in the spring of 1818, where, in a move that anticipates Thoreau, 'he withdrew from the musical society of Lexington, Frankfort, and Louisville and went to live in a log cabin in the woods around Bardstown. This was a significant moment in Heinrich's life, for here he paused to study and instruct himself in the art of music by improvising on the violin, and finally to write down these expressions as vocal, piano, and violin compositions.'  His first major publication, a collection of songs and pieces for violin and piano, was called The Dawning of Music in Kentucky or the Pleasures of Harmony in the Solitude of Nature (1820).  Like William Henry Fry, he composed a noisy piece inspired by the Niagara Falls, The War of the Elements and the Thundering of Niagara. He was friendly with John James Audubon and in addition to the The Ornithological Combat of Kings mentioned above, composed The Columbiad, or Migration of American Wild Passenger Pigeons. Heinrich's music was performed to acclaim in New York in the 1840s and there were successful concerts back in Prague in 1857, but four years later the old man died in poverty. 

John James Audubon, Passenger Pigeon, from Birds of America (1827-38)

The article by David Barron quoted above includes an amusing description of an occasion on which Heinrich was introduced to President Tyler, written by John Hill Hewitt, the piano teacher to Tyler's daughter:

'The composer labored hard to give full effect to his weird production; his bald pate bobbed from side to side, and shone like a bubble on the surface of a calm lake.  At times his shoulders would be raised to the line of his ears, and his knees went up to the keyboard, while the perspiration rolled in large drops down his wrinkled cheeks.
The ladies stared at the maniac musician, as they, doubtless, thought him, and the president scratched his head, as if wondering whether wicked spirits were not rioting in the cavern of mysterious sounds and rebelling against the laws of acoustics. The composer labored on, occasionally explaining some incomprehensible passage, representing, as he said, the breaking up of the frozen river Niagara, the thaw of the ice, and the dash of the mighty falls. Peace and plenty were represented by soft strains of pastoral music, while the thunder of our naval war-dogs and the rattle of our army musketry told of our prowess on sea and land.

The inspired composer had got about half-way through his wonderful production when Mr. Tyler restlessly arose from his chair, and placing his hand gently on Heinrich's shoulder, said;
“That may all be very fine, sir, but can't you play us a good old Virginia reel?”'

A Book of Migrations

Rebecca Solnit's A Book of Migrations (1997) was reissued this year and classified as history/memoir rather than travel, though it is ostensibly about a month spent in Ireland.  The book circles round the themes of landscape and memory, place and identity, journey and exile, as Solnit ranges across the history and culture of Ireland from the flight of the cursed King Sweeney to the bitter experiences of Travellers in contemporary Ireland. The ways in which Ireland has been viewed through the prism of English cultural attitudes are illuminated by the frequent reminders of her own radically different experiences growing up in California, with its arid landscapes and long, straight roads, short historical memory and assumptions about the possibility of an unpeopled wilderness. At the Cliffs of Moher she looks out at the sea, 'a deeper blue than my own churning gray Pacific, blue as though different dreams had been dumped into it, blue as ink.  I imagined filling a fountain pen with it and wondered what one would write with that ocean.'
    

Cover photo by Dave Walsh who reviews the book on his website.

I'll try to convey here just one of the many interesting points she makes on landscape and culture, although I should stress that the elegance of her argument is difficult to convey out of context.  In describing the sixteenth century suppression of Ireland by English colonists and its deforestation for shipbuilding and metal smelting, she also talks about the concurrent campaign to suppress the Gaelic poets, whose rhymes in praise of military successes were seen as a kind of propaganda. But 'what is most peculiar about the war against the poets and trees in Tudor era Ireland is the close involvement of the two greatest English poets of the age, Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser.' Furthermore, these were the two writers who practically created the English tradition of pastoral poetry. You might think, she wryly observes, that 'a country of wandering poets and pastoralists should have enchanted the English rather than appalled them.'

Sir Philip Sidney's father was Lord Deputy of Ireland and urged the English to 'spoil' and take the goods of any 'rhymers' they caught.  Sidney himself would later go on diplomatic missions to Ireland for Queen Elizabeth. Spenser went over in 1580 as secretary to Sir Henry Sidney's successor Lord Grey and wrote a lengthy report A View on the Present State of Ireland, which recommends subduing the Irish by starving them.  He took over an estate in County Cork, formerly the seat of the Desmond family, and 'immediately became unpopular with the neighbours'. It was targeted by rebels in 1598 - Spenser was lucky to escape to England, where he died later that year.  Back in 1589, when Sir Walter Raleigh visited him, Spenser's home 'was surrounded with woods of "matchless height"; a few years later only bare fields surrounded the castle.'

The remains of Spenser's Kicolman Castle, County Cork

Photo: Early Modern Whale

For Solnit the shadows of Spenser and Sidney's political lives in Ireland lie across their artistic merit.  'The exquisite poetry of Spenser's masterpiece The Faerie Queene is inextricably linked to his brutal prose A View on the Present State of Ireland ... Should the magical trees he celebrated in the poem be weighed against the trees he uprooted in County Cork?  Can one have the latter without the former, since Ireland's lack of a landscape tradition is rooted in its scarred landscape?  Can one understand the presence of English literature without the absences of Irish literature?  Are the presences in the former, at some level, bites taken out of the latter?  Is England gardenlike because Ireland was prisonlike?  Does the English pastoral, and the security and abundance it represents, depend on the impoverished land and people of other lands?'