Like clouds accompanying the rising summer sun

Here's an idea for an art installation.  You pass into a room between the trunks of two pine trees that show signs of having been cut into with a large axe and smaller one.  In front of you is a pond covered with lotus plants, lit so that the veins in their leaves stand out.  Placed on low plinths around the room are a torn net, hemp stalks, frayed rope, oxen fur and a lump of alum.  Vitrines contain horses teeth, thorns, split beans and broken bands.  And on the three walls facing you, video projections show silent footage of an eddying whirlpool, falling rain and roiling clouds. This installation would (as some readers will have recognised) be inspired by the various types of shaping lines (ts'un) used in traditional Chinese landscape painting.  For example, expand the image of Fan Kuan's Travellers among Mountains and Streams below and you can see his use of the 'rain dot stroke', which one source characterises as 'many perpendicular, forceful, short lines executed under a quick brush. Collectively, they look like the marks left by a heavy rain on a mud wall. This type of stroke is suitable for depicting the pocked appearance of the eroded loess plateaus of northern China.'  There are various lists of these brush strokes and the one I've reproduced below is in Fritz van Briessen's The Way of the Brush: Painting Techniques of China and Japan.

 Fan Kuan, Travellers among Mountains and Streams, c.1000

Luan ma ts’un – like tangled hemp stalks
     (also called luan ch’ai ts’un, like tangled bundles of brushwood)
Ho yeh ts’un – like the veins of lotus leaves
Chieh so ts’un – like unravelled hemp rope
P’i ma ts’un – like spread out hemp fibres
Ma p’i ts’un – like a tangled ball of hemp fibres
Luan yün ts’un – like rolling billows of cloud
Niu mao ts’un – like cow hair
P’o wang ts’un - like a torn net
Fan t’ou ts’un – like lumps of alum
Tan wo ts’un – like eddies of a whirlpool
Kuei mien ts’un – like the wrinkles on a demon’s face
Hsiao fu p’i ts’un – like the cuts made by a small axe
Ta fu p’i ts’un – like the cuts made by a big axe
Che-tai-ts’un – like broken bands
Ma ya ts’un – like horses teeth
Tou pan ts’un – like two halves of a bean
Yü tien ts’un – like raindrops
Tz’u li ts’un – like thorns
Mi tien ts’un – like the dots used by Mi Fei

In that imaginary installation I drew upon (rather than drawing with) all of these ts'un, except two which don't correspond directly to things we might encounter out in the landscape - the wrinkles on a demon's face and the brush stroke named after a specific artist, Mi Fei. The others all suggest ways in which the motion of the hand is akin to a natural process and seem to situate the artist in direct connection with animals, plants, rocks or water whilst in the very act of shaping a landscape painting.  I like the fact that these links are indirect and metaphorical - mountains, for example, can be constructed from clouds (with a luan yün ts’un, the brush is 'moved in an orbit, like clouds accompanying the rising summer sun.')  Placed in a gallery all objects prompt metaphorical readings: it would be hard to view a torn net or a pile of thorns as nothing more than signifiers of themselves, or reminders of how particular brush strokes have been termed. So it is with a painting like Travellers among Mountains and Streams, a Taoist vision of nature rather than a strictly topographical one: a symbolic journey through high mountains, their rocky sides mottled like the aftermath of a rain shower. 

The codification of style in painting manuals like The Mustard-seed Garden and the way landscapes could be built up from simple forms has prompted modern computer programmers to simulate the small axe cut, the hemp-fibre stroke and so on.  A paper by Way and Shih, for example, describes work on the synthesis of rock textures in Chinese landscape painting, aiming to provide tools for digital artists and allow the automatic rendering of Chinese-style landscapes.  Their mathematical models have no connection to physical objects or natural processes; but then it is also possible to imagine Fan Kuan dabbing his brush onto the silk scroll oblivious to the rain drops falling outside.  Can this gap between art and the world be closed?  In his New River Watercolours, John Cage took stones from a river and drew round them to create marks not unlike roiling cloud strokes: "with the involvement of the rock, the line is not so much me as it is the rock." And Brice Marden (as I was saying a couple of weeks ago) uses sticks in his calligraphic drawing to produce natural variations in the line.  These objects restrict the artist to a type of gesture whilst releasing the expressive potential of the brush stroke.  Cage said that as he traced the stones, "a slight turning of the brush on my part makes a big difference in the line. So, it's hard to explain, but I'm moving toward a freedom of gesture while at the same time using gesture."

Lipstick Traces

Earlier this month I received an email from cultural geographer Hayden Lorimer tipping me off to a Radio 4 programme he had written called 'The Perfumed Mountaineer': "Listeners are promised a potent brew: photography and perfumery, lipstick and landscape.  All of it beribboned in the story of one man's life-world."  This turned out to be an exploration of the 'double life' of Walter Poucher (1891-1988), a pioneer mountain photographer who also worked for perfumers Yardley, where he invented the Bond Street fragrance.  Producer Tim Dee describes his experience making the programme on the Radio 4 blog: 'Hayden does know his hills, he runs up and down Scottish ones for pleasure, he has also always seemed properly fragrant, so, I was very pleased to set off with him into the English Peaks and Scottish Highlands but also down Jermyn Street in central London to the back rooms of a perfumery in pursuit of people who either knew the man himself or knew about the life and works of Walter Poucher.'  The programme is no longer available to listen to but Hayden has sent me the script from which I quote below.

'The print titles of Walter Poucher’s photographic books run down their spines, and they’re just irresistible, toying with the topographical imagination: A Camera in The Cairngorms, The Backbone of England, Peak Panorama, The Surrey Hills, Highland Holiday, Lakeland Through the Lens. At the height of his photographic career, Walter Poucher functioned as the Great British viewfinder. Prolific and bestselling, across 50 books, most appearing in the 1940s and 50s, he compiled a picturesque geography of mountains, high hills and summit panoramas. If he had the magic eye, success didn’t tempt him to widen his range. "I was never interested in taking pictures of nudes, towns or churches because many people do it. I’ve never wanted to photograph anything but mountains"' Poucher used that iconic twentieth century camera, the Leica, but he was as precise at noting down and recommending viewpoints as an eighteenth century follower of the Rev. William Gilpin. 'At the back of each book appear technical notes and photographic data: what month of the year, what time of day, lens, exposure, aperture, filter. Even exactly where to stand: Click. Click. Click.'

So, Walter Poucher has a significant place in the history of British landscape photography, and his work for Yardley produced the three volume Perfumes, Cosmetics and Soaps (1923), now in its 10th edition. But what intrigues Hayden is the way Poucher didn't separate the two halves of his life: as he hiked over the uplands of Britain he would wear the make-up he had worked on - 'an extreme form of field-testing, and out of pure enthusiasm for Yardley’s products.'  The programme highlighted the funny side of this and re-told the story of Poucher's encounter with Liz Taylor, who 'wished more men took as much trouble with their appearance.'  But it also hinted at interesting questions around our assumptions concerning appropriate or expected behaviour out in the landscape.  In his academic work Hayden has been a key figure in cultural geography's 'performative turn', a shift from the study of representations (the kind of analysis that would highlight the absence of people in Poucher's wilderness vistas) towards an investigation of experiences and ways of being in the landscape.  He sees Poucher as 'someone who made the staging of self into his life’s work; even when it was mountain scenery that was his subject.'  And this is the context for Poucher's appearance in one of the most frequently repeated clips in British television history.  When Grace Jones attacks the chat show host Russell Harty it is for paying too much attention to his other guest: an elderly mountain photographer, seemingly from a different era, until you notice that he is wearing golden gloves and sky-blue eyeliner. 

 

Cold Mountain

I was at Tate Modern on Monday for the inaugural talk in a new American Artist Lecture Series, organised by the US embassy.  The ambassador's wife Marjorie Susman provided one of the four introductions that preceded Brice Marden's talk and Q&A with Sir Nicholas Serota.  Later in the week she was interviewed with Marden on Radio 4's Front Row, at the ambassador's official residence in an ornate state banqueting room: mahogany table, gilt decorations and, thanks to the State Department's ART in the Embassies programme, a large painting from Marden's Cold Mountain series.  This had recently served as the backdrop to a dinner in which the Obamas met the Queen.  Marden acknowledges that financial and political power can negate the effect of an artwork but thinks that this painting is 'in a position where it's allowed to try to do its work'.  I'm always intrigued by the choice of art works in places of power (No. 10 Downing Street for example) and in this case the choice seems at odds with the inspiration for Marden's painting, that mysterious T'ang Dynasty poet-hermit Han-shan ('Cold Mountain'), an inspirational figure for later Zen poets and painters.  In a brief digression on Monday, Nick Serota recalled showing the Queen around Tate Modern: when she got to the Rothko room she asked, to his surprise, whether "this artist was into Zen".  I like to imagine her at that state banquet, sitting under Brice Marden's painting thinking of Han-shan.  'The Cold Mountain trail goes on and on/ ... Who can leap the world's ties / And sit with me among the clouds?'

Gary Snyder's translations of Cold Mountain, 

A Tokyo National Museum postcard showing a scroll painting of Han-shan and Shih-te,

A Serpentine Gallery postcard showing Brice Marden's Cold Mountain 2 (1989-91).

In addition to Cold Mountain, Brice Marden mentioned on Monday his admiration for Chinese calligraphy, the landscape painter Shitao's treatise on painting, and the tradition of scholar's rocks, several examples of which he now owns.  He has also been inspired by Chinese and Japanese gardens, with their capacity to distill "the energy of the landscape".  A recent canvas uses a shade of blue used in 11th century Chinese pottery, the "colour of sky after rain." It is a colour he may well glimpse here in wet and windy London: a bit of a shock after the Greek island of Hydra, where he has been spending time relaxing at his studio, sitting in the sun and reading Cavafy and Seferis.  He described to Serota another of his studios in upstate New York, at Tivoli, not far from Olana, the former home of Frederic Edwin Church.  Marden was unapologetic about his admiration for the Hudson River landscape, despite its familiar place in American art history: "going through Spring up there is so incredible you just have to make paintings of it."  He said "I love going out drawing in nature, although I don't draw trees and stuff".  Instead he uses trees and stuff: sticks dipped in ink which allow accidental marks and natural variations in the line.  Harder ones are best - it is, he said with a twinkle in the eye, a drag when your stick goes soft.

Margate Walk

We made it to Margate on Monday for the last day of the Hamish Fulton exhibition.  As you can see from the picture above, it was paired with 'Turner and the Elements'.  I won't say anything about the Turners aside from concurring with the views of Iain Sinclair on Front Row: "magnificent paintings worth crawling on your hands and feet to Margate to see" (although you only have three more days to see it, so you may need to start crawling now). Turner's late period will be examined in another show this year at Tate Liverpool, alongside late works by Twombly and Monet.  Whether Hamish Fulton's recent art could be described as a late period may depend on how his practice develops - I should think he is so fit from the walking that he'll be literally scaling new heights for many years to come.  But there's certainly a sense in some of the pieces that he is looking back over a lifetime's work, as in 'WALKING COAST TO COAST COAST TO RIVER RIVER TO COAST RIVER TO RIVER 31 WALKS 1971-2010'.  Other recent text works look back to his earliest hitchhiking and group walking experiences (which I discussed in an earlier post).

For this exhibition Fulton organised a participative walk on Margate Sands around the rectangular Marine Bathing Pool wall.  Imagining I suppose that Fulton might have mellowed into a kind of conceptual art scout leader, my wife wondered if the participants were allowed to talk to each other - but the instructions were strict: to 'walk slowly, in silence'. The point of this was to focus attention on the process of walking itself and the video of the event conveys this contemplative quality, with silhouettes constantly moving whilst the outline of the walk and the mirror-like surface of the water remain still.  It made me reflect on the shapes Fulton has himself traced over the landscapes he has visited, lines visualised for example criss-crossing the map of Europe in 'WALKING COAST TO COAST...' The Margate walk participants interviewed in the video clip below describe the experience as 'cold', 'interesting', 'Zen-like', 'mesmerising', 'therapeutic', 'disorientating', 'cold'...  One says that all he could look at was the bloke in front's shoes, and then spent the whole walk wanting to tell him that his laces had come undone.

Gone fishing

I've been getting interested in the work of Finnish artist Caroline Slotte, who aims to reveal 'the poetry of everyday objects' by reworking found objects, mainly second hand ceramic items. In the examples below, she has cut into and sanded down the dream-like ideal landscapes to be found on discarded plates.  Writing on the V&A blog, Glenn Adamson describes her work as evoking 'the sense of loss and memory that old china often carries in our lives, as it sits silent and half-forgotten in the cupboard.' The museum has an example of her Rose Border Multiple series, in which a set of plates has been cut through and stacked to evoke the 'historical recession of time'.  Looking into these tiny stage sets, like paper theatres, an awareness of their history as mass-produced objects gives way to early childhood memories in which blue and white china plates were an exotic and unfathomable feature of the dining room, with figures that seemed capable of coming to life and landscapes that might allow themselves to be entered into.

Caroline Slotte, Rose Border Multiple, Double Blue II,

reworked second hand object, 2007 

Source: Caroline Slotte, used with permission

Other Caroline Slotte pieces work through a process of erasure, leaving only boats in the Gone Fishing series and cloud patterns in Under Blue Skies.  The former are particularly poignant, where seemingly everything has been forgotten but the presense of a fishing boat. They seem to have sailed into the kind of misty emptiness we associate with Chinese landscape painting, a Taoist void.  In the example below, the tiny vessel appears to be heading past a stain on the plate resembling a low sun seen through fog. (Writing this reminds me that in the previous post here I referred to Leonardo's comment that the artist could turn stains into imaginary landscapes...)  But in Gone Fishing, the landscape, which was nothing more than in fantasy in the first place, has disappeared, and any memories of the plate itself and the story of how it sustained that crack are unrecoverable.

Caroline Slotte, Gone Fishing,

reworked second hand object, 2007 

Source: Caroline Slotte, used with permission

Caroline Slotte is one of several contemporay ceramic artists re-working found objects.  Another is Paul Scott who (like Slotte) features in  Edmund De Waal's The Pot Book, with a piece called Cumbrian Blue(s) Trees in a Fenced Garden (made in collaboration with Ann Linnemann).  The trees are on two porcelain cups and look as if they could come from a Willow pattern landscape but for the small silhouette of an aeroplane above.  The fenced garden is a tray printed with a rolling landscape but surrounded by the kind of railings you would expect to find in a municipal park.  This kind of anti-pastoral pastiche has been used in recent years by designers in various media: the toile wallpaper patterns, for example, of Timorous Beasties and Jessica Smith.  Paul Scott's other designs include Foot and Mouth, Dounreay and Three Gorges After the Dam - a theme addressed by other artists I've mentioned here, in which a Spode bone china Willow pattern plate is mostly submerged beneath the waves.  Pieces like these may provoke a reaction in the spirit of eighteenth century satire, but they have little of the haunting quality to be found in Slotte's reworked objects.  As Edmund De Waal says, her work is engaged in uncovering a mystery, whilst simultaneously contructing a new one.

Strange ridges and shadowy craters

In 1973 Gerhard Richter made a series of paintings based on close-up photographs of oil paintings.  According to Mark Godfrey in 'Damaged Landscapes' (an essay I've referred to before) Richter 'chose images where the swirls of paint seemed to recede from the plane of the painting.  These Details therefore appear like fictitious landscapes with strange ridges and shadowy craters.'  Leonardo da Vinci famously suggested in his Notebooks that 'when you look at a wall spotted with stains, or with a mixture of stones, if you have to devise some scene, you may discover a resemblance to various landscapes, beautified with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys and hills in varied arrangement.'  In an earlier post I wondered whether Thomas Jones' A Wall in Naples could be considered a landscape painting, but perhaps I wasn't looking closely enough.  As you can see from the detail below (another sketch made from the roof terrace above the rooms he rented in Naples), the crumbling masonry painted by Jones starts to assume the semblance of a landscape.  But Richter's Details provoke the thought that landscapes might be discerned at some level of magnification in the folds of a velvet dress, the shadow beneath a bowl of fruit or an angel's wing. And I can almost imagine a kind of fractal landscape painting that would depict a view simultaneously at the level of the canvas, the brush stroke and the pigment (which would then need to be exhibited outside, in front of the landscape itself).

Thomas Jones, Rooftops in Naples (detail), 1782

Thomas Girtin, The White House at Chelsea (raking light detail), 1800

The terrain of the paper underneath Thomas Girtin's The White House at Chelsea becomes visible at close range, in raking light (see Peter Bower's essay 'Tone, Texture and Strength: Girtin's Use of Paper' in the Tate's 2002 Girtin retrospective catalogue).  Curators often show us explanatory photographs that resemble geological sections through the paint layers of old masterpieces.  Microscopic images of pigment return us to the basic stuff of landscape - ochre, sienna, umber. Of course this 'thingly substructure', as Heidegger called it in 'The Origin of the Work of Art', should not be confused with the the actuality of the art work.  The quality of the paper in Girtin's painting need not especially interest us (although it is less easy to argue that appreciation of an actual landscape requires no interest in its natural history, an issue I've discussed here before).  Nevertheless, the scrutiny of both detail and overall effect has always been one of the pleasures of landscape art.  In the paintings of Girtin's friend, Turner, the image always seems to be both abstract and naturalistic, however you crop it.  His View of the Arsenal (below) is a vivid reminder of how artists release colour from pigment, so that it comes, in Heidegger's phrase, to shine forth. It is through this process that an art work 'lets the earth be the earth.'
 

J. M. W. Turner, View of the Arsenal (detail), c1840

Sightlines

A while ago I mentioned an essay by Kathleen Jamie, 'On Rona', and I've just read an expanded version of it in her new book Sightlines.  Its central incident is now the sighting of a family of killer whales and a breathless chase with her two companions, an archealogist and naturalist, over the clifftops to keep them in view.  This echoes an earlier section in the book where she encounters what seems to have been the same orca family off the coast of Shetland, visible from the shore 'against the wide loose blues of the sea and sky'.  On this previous occasion she was also accompanied by an expert, the birdwatcher and writer Tim Dee, whose views and reactions she weaves into the account - he shares her excitement as they jump over the rocks and tufts of pink thrift in pursuit, coming eventually to the shore, where the killer whales 'entered a broad band of glare far too bright for our human eyes.'  In Dee's book The Running Sky, he describes a similar occasion (there is no mention of anyone else with him), sitting on a clfftop watching the sea when 'suddenly yet dreamily slow, great fins came breaking through the water.'  After walking around the cliff chasing the whales he stops and gazes out again at the sunlit sea when his attention is suddenly caught by 'a tiny earth-brown wren'.  It is a fledgling and perches on him as if he were a stone wall, turning him for a moment into a part of the Shetland landscape. 

Landscape and the body are the subject of 'Pathologies', another essay in Sightlines in which Kathleen Jamie visits the pathology lab at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee.  There she is shown a cancerous liver under a microscope 'and for one unused to microscopes it was like slipping into a dream ...  I was looking down from a great height upon a pink countryside, a landscape.  There was an estuary, with a north bank and a south ... "It's like the Tay" I said, "At low tide.  With the sandbanks."  On the southside of this estuary they examine what seems to be a set of old field dykes, 'the marks of a long inhabitation of the land' - healthy tissue.  Then they swing north over the river; 'we stopped and hovered over a different kind of place, densely packed, hugger mugger, all dark dots that semed too busy for comfort' - this was the tumour.  Later, the pathologist gives her a guided tour of an infection, a pastoral scene of bacteria grazing 'like musk ox on tundra.'  On another microscope slide, she has an aerial view of a protozoan, sailing along the coast of the small intestine.  It is, she thinks, 'the nature within.  Nature we'd rather do without.'  Later, heading home, she drives along the same river Tay that she'd fancied she'd seen in the amputated liver cells, but 'the tide was in, no sandbanks.'

Grand View Garden

There is a wonderful description of landscape design in Cao Xueqin's Hong Lou Meng ('Dream of the Red Chamber', c. 1760 - translated by David Hawkes as The Story of the Stone).  The daughter of Jia Zheng has been selected to become an Imperial Concubine, but will be allowed to see her family again on a special Visitation.  To prepare for this event, the Jia family grounds are re-designed, creating a new Separate Residence and garden, the Da Guan Yuan, or Grand View Garden.  Eventually the work is complete and Jia Zheng is asked about the bian, those calligraphic boards hung in Chinese gardens with poetic phrases, often taken from classic literature.  '"These inscriptions are going to be difficult,' he said eventually. 'By rights, of course, Her Grace should have the privilege of doing them herself; but she can scarcely be expected to make them up out of her head without having seen any of the views which they are to describe. On the other hand, if we wait until she has already visited the garden before asking her, half the pleasure of the visit will be lost. All those prospects and pavilions - even the rocks and trees and flowers will seem somehow incomplete without that touch of poetry which only the written word can lend a scene.'"

One of Jia Zheng's literary friends offers a solution to this dilemma: provisional names and couplets can be composed and written on lanterns; then, when the Imperial Concubine arrives, she can decide which ones to make permanent.  Zheng agrees but worries whether he is up to it (I can't resist quoting what he says as I think I know how he feels): "In my youth I had at best only indifferent skill in the art of writing verses about natural objects - birds and flowers and scenery and the like; and now I that I am older and have devoted my energies to official documents and government papers, I am even more out of touch with this sort of thing than I was then; so that even if I were to try my hand at it, I fear that my efforts would be rather dull and pedantic ones."  As Zheng and his friends start their walk through the garden they encounter Zheng's son Bao-yu, whose behaviour has constantly disappointed his father, but who has started to show some promise in composing poetry.  The humour in what follows comes from the exchanges between father and son: Bao-yu repeatedly manages to come up with better phrases than his elders.   

Having named a miniature mountain, a pavilion on a bridge and a small retreat surrounded by green bamboos, the party reach a miniature farm with an orchard of apricot trees and enter a thatched building 'from which all hint of urban refinement has been banished'.  Bao-yu's father lectures him on the beauty of this 'natural' simplicity, but his son is not impressed: "a farm set down in the middle of a place like this is obviously the product of human artifice."  He says he is not sure what the ancients meant when they talked of things as being 'natural': '"For example, when they speak of a 'natural painting', I can't help wondering if they are not referring to precisely that forcible interference with the landscape to which I object: putting hills where they are not meant to be, and that sort of thing.  However, great the skill with which this is done, the results are never quite..."  His discourse was cut short by an outburst of rage from Jia Zheng.  "Take that boy out of here!"' 

But the work of writing poetry onto the garden is not complete, and Bao-yu is called back.  They resume their walk, considering other garden features like the place where 'a musical murmur of water issued from a cave', recalling to mind the Peach-blossom Stream of T'ao Yüan-ming (which I described here in an earlier post).  Eventually they complete their circuit back at the foot of the artificial mountain and Bao-yu is allowed to 'get back to the girls' (as a character he is rather like Proust's narrator in À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs).  It is not until the following year that the Imperial Concubine, Bao-yu's older sister, makes her Visitation and it is quite striking how many of the garden inscriptions she does choose to amend or reject.  Coming, for example, by boat over a lake to the landing stage in a grotto named 'Smartweed Bank and Flowery Harbour', she says '"Surely 'Flowery Harbour' is enough by itself?  Why 'Smartweed Bank' as well?"  At once an attendant eunuch disembarked and rushed like the wind to tell Jia Zheng, who immediately gave orders to have the inscription changed.'

Statue of Cao Xueqin in Beijing

Green and gold and turquoise waves

Camille Pissarro, The Garden of the Tuileries on a Spring Morning (1899)

During a pleasant sunny day last Saturday in the Tuileries Garden I popped into the Musée de l'Orangerie to see their excellent exhibition, 'Debussy, Music and the Arts'. The penultimate room is devoted to contemporary landscape paintings on themes that inspired Debussy: night scenes, seascapes and landscapes by Manet, Degas, Monet and others.  Debussy owned a copy of Hokusai's print The Great Wave and used it as a cover image when he published La Mer, three symphonic sketches for orchestra, in 1905.  Debussy's association with poets and playwrights like Mallarmé and Maeterlinck is highlighted throughout the exhibition and one display includes an edition of his own poetic compositions, Proses lyriques.  The consensus seems to be that these were not very good and I think this is fairly evident from 'The Strand', which attempts to describe the sea in words: 'the waves chatter like silly little girls let out of school in their lustrous frilly green silk dresses...' (see the translation on The Lied, Art Song and Choral Text Archive).  La Mer, by contrast, as I mentioned in an earlier post, is surely one of music's 'most successful evocations of the sea'.

There are various reviews, programme notes and sound recordings of La Mer online: a Radio 3 programme by Stephen Johnson, for example, in which Debussy's Impressionism is compared to Monet's waterlilies (which of course are also on show at the Musée de l'Orangerie). But I want here to quote from a short article by Nicholson Baker in Granta in which he describes visiting the hotel in Eastbourne where Debussy completed the composition.  'There was dried rain-dust on the outside of the glass, but I looked out over the water and saw, near to shore, an unexpected play of green and gold and turquoise waves – not waves, really, because they were so small, but little manifestations of fluid under-energy. The clouds had the look that a glass of rinse water gets when you’re doing a watercolour – slowly diluting black roilings, which move under the white water that you made earlier when you rinsed the white paint from the brush. But the sea didn’t choose to reflect the clouds that day; it had its own private mallard-neck pallet, the fine gradations of which varied with the slopes of the wind-textured swells. Through the dirty window, I thought I saw, for a moment, what Debussy had seen.'

Montserrat

If you are interested in the depiction of strange mountainscapes, it is worth looking out for art inspired by the Virgin of Montserrat, patroness of Catalonia. The Mare de Déu de Montserrat is a statue venerated at the Benedictine mountain monastery and she is usually shown seated on a throne among the crags or floating above the mountain tops. The Museu Frederic Marès in Barcelona has a Montserrat Hall entirely devoted to objects linked to la Moreneta ('The little dark-skinned one'), all collected by Marès (1893-1991), the artist and restorer who worked tirelessly to preserve Catalonia's artistic heritage.   It is perhaps not surprising that such a striking landscape became a symbol, recognisable even in the simple design of the dish in my photograph below.  A thousand years after the founding of the monastery the Catalan poet/priest Jacinto Verdaguer composed the 'Legends of Montserrat' (1880), including lyrics that became a famous hymn, 'Virolai', in which the formation of these serrated peaks is attributed to the work of angels, sculpting the mountain with golden saws: 'Amb serra d'or los angelets serraren'. 

Clouds over the Xiao and Xiang Rivers

'Clouds over the Xiao and Xiang Rivers' (Xiaoxiang Shuiyun) is one of the most famous qin melodies, composed at the end of the Song dynasty by Guo Mian (or Guo Chuwang, 'Chu-looking', because he travelled in the Chu region).  John Thompson's excellent site devoted to the guqin includes a sound sample and a translation of the music's original preface: 'the Emaciated Immortal says this piece was written by Mr. Chuwang, Guo Mian. Mr. Guo was from Yongjia. Whenever (while in Chu) he wanted to look at the Jiuyi mountains they were blocked by clouds above the Xiao and Xiang rivers, so he used (writing music about) this to express his loyalty to his country. However, this piece about water and clouds (also) has the suggestion of making one's own enjoyment; the flavor of cloud shapes reflected in sparkling water; and a desire to have wind and rain fall on the head, to wear a grass rain cape by the side of a river, and to use a boat on the Five Lakes (to hide from the world).'  The composition comes in ten sections, which can be compared to the Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang rivers that I described here a few years ago. 

1. Mist and rain over Dongting Lake
2. The Jiang and Han river scenery is broad and clear
3. Cloud images cast down by a brilliant sky
4. The sky and water join on the horizon
5. Waves roll and clouds fly
6. A wind comes up and stirs the water
7. Water and sky have the same azure colour
8. Cold river and cool moon
9. Limpid waves extend forever
10. (Evening) reflections contain all aspects of nature

Another surviving composition by Guo Mian is Fan Canglang ('Floating on the Canglang River') of which the Emaciated Immortal has this to say: 'Its topic is rowing a small boat in the five lakes, and casting aside rank and fame as if they were discarded mustard plants. (In the boat it feels as if you are) carrying the wind and moon and playing with the clouds and water; affairs of the world seem as insignificant as bubbles on the surface of the water, your Dao encompasses all of history, and your mind joins with the universe; its theme is like this.'  The three sections are (1) 'Mist and rain on the five lakes', (2) '(Treat) honor like mustard grass' and (3) 'Play with clouds and carry the moon in a boat.' John Thompson explains that the precise identity of this Canglang river is not clear, but the song probably refers to a poem by Qu Yuan called 'The Fisherman' in Chu Ci ('Songs of the South'). 'The unemployed and distraught Qu Yuan, wandering on a marshbank, comes across a fisherman to whom he speaks his grief. The fisherman then sings a Canglang Song, "When the water in the Canglang is clear, I can wash the tassels of my hat in it. / When the water in the Canglang is muddy, I can wash my feet in it." Without another word the fisherman then leaves Qu Yuan. The meaning of the poem is that when government is clean it is fine to work with it, but when it becomes dirty one should be happy to leave it.'

The Struga. Pictures of our Landscape.

The River Struga, Saxony

I sometimes wonder how much interesting writing on landscape in other literatures remains inaccessible to a monoglot English reader.  Consider, for example, the poetry and prose of Lusatia, written in Upper and Lower Sorbian (Slavonic languages also known historically as Lusatian or Wendish). The work of Kito Lorenc sounds intriguing: he wrote Struga. Wobrazy našeje Krajiny (The Struga.  Pictures of our Landscape) in 1967 while employed at the Sorbian Ethnological Research Institute (and more recently a volume called Ty porno mi (1988) in which, according to Gerald Stone in the Everyman Companion to East European Literature, 'erotic themes predominate'). You can read a few of Lorenc's poems, translated by Robert Elsie, in the anthology, A Rock Against these Alien Waves; 'Painting Easter Eggs', for example, which funnily enough is exactly what my sons are doing as I write these words.

Map of the Lusatians, c. 1715-24

The 'father' of modern Sorbian literature was Hendrij Zejler, a Lutheran pastor who wrote a long sequence, Počasy (The Seasons), inspired by James Thomson's work of the same name (the first volume appeared in 1847).  Apparently these poems 'embody the peasant's unsentimental view of Nature and found great favour with the common people', but I'm not clear whether they convey any particular sense of the Lusatian landscape. After Zejler's death, the Sorbian composer Korla Awgust Locor set 'The Seasons' to music and it would be interesting to know the extent to which it uses sound to evoke the natural world.  The Sorbian poem I'd most like to know more about was written by a contemporary of Zejler, another pastor, Kito Fryco Stempel.  Te tśi rychłe tšubały (The three lively trumpets), written between 1859 and 1863, is decribed by Geoffrey Stone as consisting 'of 522 syllabic sestine representing the world as an acoustic phenomenon.'

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.'