Like a cloud of mist on the silent hill

The poetry of the Scottish bard Ossian is often described in terms of its admirers: Diderot, Goethe, Thomas Jefferson, Napoleon, Wordsworth, Walter Scott, Mendelssohn etc.  Few read it now though, partly perhaps because it was exposed as a fake, written by its translator 'from the Gaelic or Erse language', James Macpherson.  In these heroic narratives there is no time for landscape description but even a cursory read reveals a remarkably dense use of nature similes, which no doubt appealed to the Romantics.  Here are a few lines from the opening of Fingal, written in 1762 (its eponymous hero was the father of Ossian and king of north-west Scotland).  The Irish general Cuthullin, sitting 'by the tree of the rustling sound' at Tura, a castle on the coast of Ulster, is approached by his scout Moran, who has just seen Swaran, king of Lochlin. 

"I beheld their chief," says Moran, "tall as a glittering rock. His spear is a blasted pine. His shield the rising moon! He sat on the shore! like a cloud of mist on the silent hill! Many, chief of heroes! I said, many are our hands of war. Well art thou named, the mighty man; but many mighty men are seen from Tura's windy walls.

"He spoke, like a wave on a rock, 'Who in this land appears like me? Heroes stand not in my presence: they fall to earth from my hand. Who can meet Swaran in fight? Who but Fingal, king of Selma of storms? Once we wrestled on Malmor; our heels overturned the woods. Rocks fell from their place; rivulets, changing their course, fled murmuring from our side. Three days we renewed the strife; heroes stood at a distance and trembled. On the fourth, Fingal says, that the king of the ocean fell! but Swaran says he stood! Let dark Cuthullin yield to him, that is strong as the storms of his land!"

If you gather together all the similes in Book 1 of Fingal they make a kind of nature poem:

like a cloud of mist on the silent hill

like a wave on a rock

like streams from the mountains

like mist that shades the hills of autumn

like the dark rolling of that wave on the coast

like reeds on the lake of Lego

like a roe from Malmor

like a hart from thy echoing hills

like a star, that shoots across the desert

like two white pillars in the halls of the great Fingal

like the bank of a mountain stream

like the thunder of heaven

like a whale of ocean

like the gathered flies of the eve

like the flame of death

like a wave near a rock

like a sun-streaked mist of the heath

like the sea round the boat of night

like a stream of smoke on a ridge of rocks

like wreaths of mist fly over the streamy vales

like the blast of winter

like my polished yew

like a flame

like a storm along the streamy vale

like the echoing main

like autumn's dark storms pouring from two echoing hills

like two deep streams from high rocks meeting, mixing roaring on the plain

like the circles of light, which gild the face of night

like two hinds of the desert

like the shrill spirit of a storm

like the beam of heaven

like two clouds

like lightning

like the sullen sound of Cromla before a storm

like snow

like the calm shower of spring

like the sun on our fields

Autumn on Mount Oshio

Ōtagaki Rengetsu, Autumn Moon, 1870

Source: Wikimedia Commons

I've been very busy this week, but I just have time for a short post to recommend the website of The Rengetsu Foundation Project, which is dedicated to one of Japan's most fascinating cultural figures.  Ōtagaki Rengetsu's achievements were so various that she is hard to classify - in his primer How to Look at Japanese Art, Stephen Addiss decides to place her in his chapter on calligraphy, but she was equally famous for her waka poetry and ceramics (Rengetsu ware).  She was also skilled in painting, dance, sewing and the tea ceremony.  Not only that, but in her youth, before becoming a nun, she was a famous beauty proficient in the martial arts - sword, spear and sickle and chain - having been adopted as a child by a family known for training ninjas.  However, the Foundation site's biography explains that 'she was a pacifist, advocating mutual respect and gentle persuasion in resolving conflict.'  In her middle years she travelled widely and landscape is treated in many of her poems, brushed or carved onto pots and presented as calligraphy on tanzaku and shikishi paper.

The Rengetsu Foundation has 917 poems in a searchable database; I see that 133 of them, for example, contain the word 'mountain'.  I will quote just one of the translations below.  As I write this, I can hear the cold wind outside and it feels like we are nearing the end of autumn... 

Piercing my body

   the sad departure of autumn

      on Mount Oshio...

   where red leaves fall—

      the withering wind.

The Landscape is Staring at Us

Regrettably I don't normally have time to read the London Review of Books although the 6th October issue was a good one - Kathleen Jamie on Orkney and reviews of a new book on Frederick Law Olmsted and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.  The LRB often has reports on current art exhibitions but I was intrigued to see in this issue a review of something I can safely assume few of us will get to see, the fourth Land Art Mongolia biennial.  The whole article by Lewis Biggs is available to read for non-subscribers.  He describes getting to the venue, a former Soviet youth camp by a small lake near the volcano of Altan Ovoo, and seeing 'the 18 artworks were spread across the landscape in various stages of production or dissolution.'  One of the things that interests me about this is the art world forces that have led to such an event, forty-eight years after the first Earth Works exhibition in New York. 

'Both the traditional and realist genres are taught at the art school that’s now a part of Ulaanbaatar university, so why be a land artist? Perhaps because anything perceived purely as a ‘craft tradition’ in galleries and markets beyond Mongolia will have a more limited reception than works in an international idiom. In the 1980s artists outside the G7 countries understood that they were less visible if they didn’t speak or write in English, but at the end of that decade, the big Paris show Magiciens de la terre led the art institutions of wealthier countries to accept that the ‘contemporary’ idioms of land and performance art (though rarely painting or sculpture) were continuous with ancient forms in other cultures. A Buddhist stupa on a mountain top or a Peruvian desert drawing could now be considered a form of land art, and a shamanic trance – as Joseph Beuys recognised early in his career – a kind of performance art.'

The video clip I've embedded above is by one of the non-Mongolian artists at the biennial, Lisa Batacchi, performing a ritual offering of milk.  The clip below is a piece on a previous biennial and includes Japanese performance artist Megumi Shimizu painting black ink onto a rock with her hair.  This reminded me of Ink Wang, who I mentioned here a couple of weeks ago, the Tang dynasty artist who, it is said, dipped his top knot into ink in order to paint strange, expressive landscapes.  In this footage it looks like she is creating a simplified version of the rock by accentuating its shadows, although a bit disappointingly she ends by adding an eye - the piece is called 'The Landscape is Staring at Us'.  International artists participating in an event like this must find themselves in a potentially uncomfortable position and political engagement may be the easiest way of avoiding any concerns about cultural appropriation.  Italian artist Beatrice Catanzaro, interviewed below, made her piece after researching an illegal gold mine with local activists.  Mongolian artist Dajvadorj Sereeter, on the other hand, makes land art by installing tracings of ancient rock carvings.

The source of the Sorgue

 Philippe-Jacques van Brée, Laura and Petrarch at Fountaine-de-Vaucluse, 1816
Source: Wikimedia Commons

In 1337, a year after his ascent of Mont Ventoux, Petrarch travelled to Rome. On his return to Avignon he found that the city's decadence still disgusted him.  In his 'Letter to Posterity' he says that 'seeking some means of escape, I fortunately discovered a delightful valley, narrow and secluded, called Vaucluse, about fifteen miles from Avignon, where the Sorgue, the prince of streams, has its source.  Captured by the charms of the place, I transferred myself and my books there' (trans. Mark Musa).  Elsewhere he wrote a wonderful description of his home at Fountaine-de-Vaucluse.  The translation of this passage below is in The Wind and the Source by Allen S. Weiss.  

'Here I have acquired two small gardens perfectly suited to my skills and taste. To attempt a description for you would be too long. In short, I believe that no similar spot exists in all the world, and, to confess my unmanly fickleness, I regret only that it is not in Italy. I customarily call it my transalpine Helicon. The one garden is very shady, suitable only for study and sacred to our Apollo. It overhangs the source of the Sorgue, and beyond it lies nothing but ravines and cliffs, remote and accessible only to wild beasts or birds. The other garden, near the house, appears more cultivated, and it is a delight to Bacchus. This one, astonishing as it may seem, is in the midst of the very beautiful and swift-running river. Nearby, divided from it by a very small bridge on the further side of the house, hangs a curved vault of native rock that now provides shelter against the summer heat. It is a place that inspires studies, and I suspect is not too dissimilar to the little hall where Cicero used to declaim his orations, except that he did not have a Sorgue flowing alongside. Under this vault, therefore, I spend my afternoons, and my mornings on the hillsides; the evenings I spend in the meadows or in my less cultivated garden at the source where my efforts have conquered nature and cleared a spot under the high cliff in the midst of the waters, narrow indeed but very inspiring, in which even a sluggish mind can rise to the noblest thoughts.'

As Weiss points out, this description suggests a perfect balance between the Apollonian and Dionysian temperaments which Nietzsche would make famous in his writings on aesthetics. Petrarch was influenced by both Christian and Pagan traditions, by Saint Augustine and Cicero.  In a letter to Cardinal Colonna, he described his creation of a garden as a war with the Nymphs, who try to chase away his Muses, but when he thinks of erecting an altar it is to Mary, rather than to the gods of rivers and springs.  It sounds like a delightful retreat, where Petrarch could concentrate on his writing 'amidst the sound of birds and nymphs, and accompanied by few servants but many books.'  It was also a base from which Petrarch could wander the countryside, 'roving over the meadows and mountains and fountains, living in the woods and in the countryside, fleeing human footsteps, following the birds, loving the shadows, enjoying the mossy caves and the blooming meadows...' 

Mountains, rocks, clouds and rivers would emerge

Ten years ago, in an early post here, I mentioned the mysterious Ink Wang and other ‘late T’ang eccentrics’, distant prototypes of the New York Action painters. I recently came upon a 1998 academic article that goes into more detail on the stories surrounding these artists: '"The Image Made by Chance" in China and the West: Ink Wang Meets Jackson Pollock's Mother' by Charles Lachman.  Leaving aside Jackson Pollock's mother, here's what we know of three of these T'ang dynasty artists.

• Ink Wang (fl. 785-805) is mentioned in two early Chinese art histories.  Chu Ching-hsuan , writing in around 840, described his approach as follows.  'When Wang was ready to paint a scroll, he would begin drinking, and after he became drunk he would splash ink on the silk, laughing and singing all the while. He would kick at it, or smear it with his hand, sweeping and scrubbing with his brush, here with pale ink there with dark, and from the configurations thus achieved, mountains, rocks, clouds and rivers would emerge.'  The other historian to mention him is Chang Yenyüan (Zhang Yanyuan) in 847, who claimed that Wang would soak his topknot in ink and butt his head against the scroll.

• Lachman goes on to describe a kindred spirit, "a certain Mr. Ku", active in the late eighth century.  'When he was ready to paint, he would first lay out numerous pieces of silk on the floor; then he would grind the ink and prepare various colours, and put them into containers. After he became a bit tipsy from wine, he would then run around the silk several dozen times, finally taking the ink and spilling it all over. Next he would sprinkle on the colours. The places where they spilled he would cover with a large cloth; then he would have someone sit on it, while he himself grasped it by one corner and pulled it all around. After he was finished, he would then add the finishing touches with a brush.'  Quite what emerged from this process - landscapes or other subject matter - his source does not say.

• Finally there was the Mountain Man of Fan-yang, a hermit who pioneered a form of water painting.  'It required a ten-foot-square pit dug about one foot deep, with its floor and walls plastered over with clay and then filled with water. The painter then prepared ink and pigments which he freely brushed on the surface of the water, creating a chaotic swirl of colours. After several days, when the water had seeped out of the pit, he put strips of fine silk on the floor of it, and made a rubbing that, when removed, showed aged pines, bizarre rocks, people, animals, houses, and trees.'

The use of chance procedures in Chinese landscape art does not seem to have persisted, although there are a few later anecdotes from the Song Dynasty.  One concerning landscape painting involves Kuo Chung-shu (Guo Zhongshu c. 910-77).  The surviving painting that I've included below, with its carefully drawn details and clear delineation of space, clearly wasn't done under the influence.  However, Kuo is reported once to have got drunk and splashed ink about on a piece of silk, submerged it in a rushing stream and then turned the puddles and smudges of ink into a marvelous landscape painting.

Kuo Chung-shu, Travelling on the River in Snow, latter half of 10th century

Ten Views from a Thatched Hut

Lu Hong, View 1 of Ten Views from a Thatched Hut (copy of 8th century original)

Source: Wikimedia Commons

When we look at Chinese landscape paintings, we are seduced not just by their rivers and mountains, but by the idealised life of landscape contemplation they often portray.  The image above is one example, attributed to the Tang dynasty painter Lu Hong.  According to Wu Hung (in Yang Xin et al's Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting) this work, Ten Views from a Thatched Hut, may be 'the first work in Chinese art history that we could call a scholarly painting, in a style that would dominate Chinese painting after the Song, for its main features are all related to the self-identity of the scholar-artist.'  Wu identifies four characteristics that it shares with later work of this kind:

1. The landscape is neither imaginary or a famous beauty spot, it is the country estate of the painter himself.
2. The artist himself appears in most of the scenes, 'listening to the sound of a stream, standing on top of a small hill, conversing with a fellow hermit inside a cave, or cultivating longevity techniques inside his thatched hut.'
3. This is not an illustration of someone else's writings - Lu Hong was the author of text and painting, the words identifying the site portrayed and describing the artist's response to it.
4. As a monochrome painting, the text could be appreciated in its own right as calligraphy.

Lu Hong lived in the early eighth century and is usually bracketed in histories of Chinese art with his contemporary Wang Wei.  Wang was a Buddhist, Lu a Daoist.  It was the Emperor Minghuang who gifted Lu Hong his thatched hut on Mount Song, after Lu had declined the official post of Censor Counsellor.  Lu lived there in scholarly retreat, an ideal I have touched on here in many posts over the last ten years - a dream of poets drawn to nature and solitude in Tang Dynasty China, Augustan Rome, Heian Dynasty Japan, Eighteenth Century Europe and post-War California.

It will hold the spring sunlight

Musō Soseki (1275-1351) designed two of the great landscape gardens in Kyoto, both now UNESCO World Heritage Sites, neither of which I managed to get to on my all-too-brief visit to the city nearly twenty years ago.  Saihō-ji had fallen into disrepair when Musō was brought in to create a paradise garden.  It was when the garden fell into disrepair again in the nineteenth century that the moss began to grow which has become its most famous feature.   Musō cannot have anticipated this development, although acceptance of inevitable change is one of the essences of landscape design.  The temple of Tenryū-ji, was built by the shogun Ashikaga Takauji in memory of the emperor whom he had deposed.  Musō wrote a sequence of poems about the landscape garden he helped create there, 'Ten Scenes in the Dragon of Heaven Temple.'  Some of these scenes have survived the centuries, like the lake Sōgen-chi where moonlight still strikes the waters in the dead of night; others have gone, like Dragon-Gate House where Musō observed the most transient of images, two passing puffs of cloud.

A Nanbokucho-period artist, Musō Soseki, c. 1334-1392

I have been reading Musō's poetry in the translations W. S. Merwin made in collaboration with Sōiku Shigematsu. Rather than use quatrains, their versions of Musō split each line in three, giving twelve line verses that slow the reader and suggest the chanting style in which they would have sounded in the original Chinese.  Whilst it's not possible to quote a whole poem, here are some of those lines-broken-in-three, taken from different poems: nine landscapes fragments.

from 'Jewel Field'                         from 'Pine Shade'                           from 'Snow Garden'
All the soil now                            The green haze                               Flowers with six petals
   is beginning                                   so deep and dense                          have covered the whole ground
      to shed light                                   it keeps out the light                         and frozen everywhere

from 'Gem Mountain'                   from 'Spring Cliff'                             from 'It'
The rain beats upon it                  Even the withered trees                  The cold cloud full of rain
   the wind cuts it                             on the dark cliff                                passes above
      it only shines brighter                   are blossoming                                 the hollow of the mountain

from 'Gem Creek'                         from 'House of Spring'                   from 'East Peak'
Without ruffling its surface           Hundreds of open flowers              It will hold the spring sunlight
   look carefully                                all come from                                 year after year
      into the depths                               the one branch                                after year

The Khyber Pass in Hull

'There are few sights in England that can quite equal the absurd charm of the imitation Khyber Pass in Hull's East Park.  This slice of South East Asia in the East Riding sits just a short stroll away from an animal house that is home to alpacas from Peru and a lake where oversized swan pedalo boats bob about.  Seeing it now is to feel, not unlike Lewis Carroll's Alice, that you have fallen into a dreamland where normality has been temporarily suspended.' - Travis Elborough, A Walk in the Park: The Life and Times of a People's Institution, 2016

I have never visited this park (or indeed Hull, next year's City of Culture), although I am familiar with Victoria Park in Hackney, where Travis was based during the writing of his new book.  In the chapter covering the Victorian period he describes how the landscape of Empire influenced the design of our urban green spaces.  After the Crimean war, captured Russian guns began to appear: in Bath, Salford, Bradford, Blackburn, Halifax, Sunderland, Derby and Glasgow (where, during the Second World War, the gun in Kelvingrove Park was melted back down and turned into munitions).  A realistic model of Sebastopol was constructed in Surrey Zoological Gardens, a private park, which charged visitors to come and see a troupe of invalided troops reenacting the battle.  Meanwhile bandstands were designed in emulation of the kiosks of India and the Ottoman Empire. There is still one of these in Victoria Park and it is still used, although we now tend to prefer our music amplified from a big stage (the last time I went to a concert there, in 2015, it was to hear Patti Smith doing the whole of Horses).

Hull's East Park opened in 1887, with a ceremony on the day of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. As Travis describes it, the event seems not quite to have lived up to the occasion.

'In London, an Indian cavalry, headed up by the Maharao of Kutch in a diamond- and ruby-encrusted turban, and the no less resplendent Maharajar of Holkar, escorted Victoria to a special Service of Thanksgiving in Westminster Abbey.  Up in Hull, the park-opening was preceded by a somewhat more disorganised parade.  Led by the Knights of the Golden Horn and featuring Albert Loud Lodge of the United Order of Druids and a horse-drawn float carrying basket-weaving members of the local institute for the blind, it was branded the 'Jubilee Jumble' by a local newshound in the Hull Daily Mail, who deemed it a disgrace to the town and the Queen.'

East Park, Hull, 1914

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Back to Nature

There are just a couple more weeks to see George Shaw: My Back to Nature at the National Gallery.  The title comes from Shaw's observation that he has his back to nature most of the time, something that's true for myself as well: this blog is written with its back to nature, looking instead at what artists have made out of the landscape.  Underlying the paintings Shaw has conceived in response to the National Gallery collection is a nice idea, that what we don't see in the Bacchanalian revelries and triumphs of Pan, painted by artists like Poussin, is their aftermath... when the woods are quiet again and the floor is littered with bottles and discarded clothes.  In real life such remnants may be the only signs of life we encounter in the woods.  In a video to accompany the exhibition Shaw remembers finding a page from Penthouse once, only to be told by his father that he ought to be focusing his attention on the foxgloves. 

Years now after rising to prominence with scenes of the edgelands round Tile Hill, his childhood home, Shaw is still using the same humble Humbrol enamel paints.  Humbrol has nostalgic associations for many of us, although Shaw says he was never really an Airfix enthusiast - he was too busy doing art.  My own son wouldn't recognise the smell of a tin of Humbrol but I can see him one day painting sylvan landscapes in the Citadel paints he uses for Warhammer - Dryad Bark, Elysian Green, Ratskin Flesh, Troll Slayer Orange...  George Shaw's handling of Humbrol is praised by Laura Cumming in her review of the exhibition.  'Occasionally, the gallery lighting catches the glint of the Humbrol paint and the picture suddenly looks like an object as much as an image. ... Though he has remained faithful to this tough and lowly medium, despite the lure of the oil paint all around him, he takes it in new directions, achieving  the blue of a Titian sky or a Madonna’s cloak, turning a Tile Hill tarpaulin into something like silk.  The thinness is still there; these surfaces are hard-won. But the images have become deeper, more elegiac and literary.'

When I first looked round this small exhibition in May I found the contrast with the beautiful old paintings on display nearby a bit hard to take, but I now feel Jonathan Jones is right when he says 'it is not that Shaw has poisoned a once-pure landscape tradition: rather his paintings modernise the erotic myths that artists have always imagined in the woods.'  Jones thinks that 'an artist pissing against a tree is exactly what the National Gallery needs – and a painter who can hack it in the National Gallery is just what British art needs.'  To end this post I was tempted to embed Magazine's song 'Back to Nature', which Shaw mentions in the catalogue, but instead here is the artist again, poking around in some woods this time.  He points out an old tarpaulin, tin cans, packet of condoms etc., and finds a tangle of branches that would be an ideal refuge for kids, if kids still venture into such woods.  He admits he finds a painting of a tree much more exciting than a tree, "but I might change as I get older.  Maybe I just need to spend less time with paintings and more time with trees."

The fog has pathways

I was thinking, walking home this evening, that the season of mists is upon us again here in London.  Then, later, I found myself reading about a proposal for a fleet of sculptures in Santa Monica bay that would harvest fog and turn it into water. Regatta H₂O, by Christopher Sjoberg and Ryo Saito, has just won first prize in the biannual Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI) contest. According to the Smithsonian website, the 'sails are made of mesh, which is veined with troughs to collect fog and transport it to the masts, where it can be piped to storage containers on the shore. When there’s not enough moisture in the air to generate fog, the sails retract for an unobstructed view. The energy needed to operate the pumping and steering mechanisms is wind-generated. At night, extra energy lights up rings that serve as navigational safety markers.'

The photographs of this artwork suggest that the sails would not actually disperse the blanket of water vapour covering the bay.  It would, after all, be a shame to lose our fogs or demystify our mists.  I'm reminded of something Etel Adnan said in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrest (Etel Adnan in all her Dimensions, 2014), how she regretted that London no longer has its great fogs.  Adnan, whose art and poetry I wrote about earlier this year, has been inspired by the fogs of San Franciso.  ‘I love fog.  The arrival of fog is the coming of a new living being, the entering in the world of an extraordinary event.’  Fogs would come in from the ocean every afternoon around five o’clock. ‘It is not something static, it arrives like a horizontal cascade.  This fog has pathways.  It is stopped by the mountain, and by hills in the East, but it pours and even forms a huge curtain that isolates San Francisco by its surroundings.’  She has even tried to film the fog. In Journey to Mount Tamalpais she says ‘I made a movie, once, of fog, fog, fog.  They said “It’s a study in greys, an abstract movie, a joke!”  It’s none of these things.  It is the fog.’

 

The Rakkóx cliffs

Félix Vallotton, illustration for Paul Scheerbart's Rakkóx the Billionaire, 1901

In this picture Kasimir Stummel, a young man employed in the Rakkóxian Department of Invention, is suggesting a grand project to Rakkóx, the eccentric multi-billionaire who is obsessed with spending his money on ever more grandiose schemes.  "When one wants to build on a grand scale," Stummel says, "it is prudent to make use of existing natural features, so that in the end it appears that one has created nature as well."  But what he asks is something far more ambitious - "you could transform not merely pieces of rock, but rather an entire cliff from top to bottom into a work of architectural art?  That truly would be a great thing, and would encourage coming generations over the course of the next millennium to convert the entirety of the Earth's surface into a great work of architectural art."

Later in the story the two men stand looking out over the moonlit ocean and Stummel provides further details of this concept.  In recent years artists like Michael Heizer may have carved huge structures out of the landscape but what Stummel describes is a means of sculpting the landscape into new forms of habitation.  

'There are a number of mountains that can easily be brought into a rectangular architectural form, and gleaming, complexly curved architectural compositions can be created, as well.  The halls that will be created within the Rakkóx cliffs will be of unprecedented dimensions, modern dimensions.  The new machines work so reliably that cave-ins need not be feared.  Furthermore, our mathematicians work almost too carefully.  I will cut off the entire top of the Cliffs of Kasimir so there can be a skylight in every hall.  I imagine the halls being almost completely filled with apartments - back porches, porticoes, and balconies of any expanse desired may be included.  The granite halls will appear immense.  Two hundred metres high - smooth as glass!  And the lighting will be torchlight.  In the lower levels there will be huge rooms for taking the waters - with fountains, cascades, ponds and gondolas.  Compared to these palace mountains the great cathedrals are not worthy of attention, wouldn't you agree?'

- trans. W. C. Bamberger for the Wakefield Press edition.

Paul Scheerbart photographed by Wilhelm Fechner, 1897

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Paul Scheerbart's visionary science fiction and writings on architecture have been attracting increasing attention.  New translations into English have begun to appear - see for example the review of Lesabéndio: An Asteroid Novel at Hyperallergic (Alfred Kubin's original illustrations can be seen at 50 Watts).  If you are not familiar with Scheerbart, I recommend profiles of his work at Writers No One Reads or the NYRB Blog.  The University of Chicago Press have now published an introductory anthology, Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!!: A Paul Scheerbart Reader (see 'Dreams from a Glass House', a Paris Review interview with Josiah McElheny, who co-edited it).  Writing about this book for Apollo, Owen Hatherley, notes that Scheerbart's manifesto on 'Glass Architecture was rediscovered in the English-speaking world by Reyner Banham in his 1960 book, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, which presents Scheerbart, with Marinetti and Malevich, as one of the inadvertent fathers of the modern movement in architecture and design.' An Architect piece on Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! describes Scheerbart as a precursor of Archigram, the Japanese Metabolists and Rem Koolhaas. 

Kina Balu from Pinokok Valley, lithograph, 1862

Source: Wikimedia Commons 

Scheerbart's fictional version of the contemporary starchitect is Edgar Krug, the hero of his last novel The Gray Cloth, published in 1914, the same year as his manifesto on Glass Architecture.  As Krug flies round the world in his airship, responding to new commissions for glass architecture, some of his designs approach the ambition of Rakkóxian cliffs.  At one point he describes having to dissuade a client from converting Mount Kinabalu in Borneo into a pyramid, arguing that its mountain form should be retained but that it could be 'made habitable' with restaurants, terraces and baths.  Coming to see how work has progressed, Herr Krug arrives at night, seeing the mountain summit illuminated by the spotlights of airships and aeroplanes already there.  He and his companions admire the lever-trains which transport people rapidly up the mountain, using five-hundred-meter-long lever-arms.  They enjoy a lantern festival and visit a large glass hall with shells embedded in its walls.  On the night before they leave, they look out on the ocean from the mountain-top restaurant.  'The moon was not to be seen.  Meteors moved along parabolic lines across the starry skies.  On the horizon Venus was radiant.'

Bruno Taut, Glass House, 1914

 Source: Wikimedia Commons 

Scheerbart considered his collaboration with Bruno Taut on the Glass House at the Cologne Werkbund Exhibition to be 'the greatest event in my life.'  After Scheerbart's death in 1915, Taut formed a circle of German expressionist architects, The Crystal Chain, and wrote his own book in which a mountain landscape is transformed, Alpine Architecture (1919).  Composed in the last years of the war, it opposed utilitarian and materialistic culture with an ideal city of glass, built on the mountain tops and reflected in their lakes. These ideas were a manifestation of the vision Scheerbart had set out in his manifesto on Glass Architecture:

'If we want our culture to rise to a higher level, we are obliged, for better or for worse, to change our architecture. And this only becomes possible if we take away the closed character from the rooms in which we live. We can only do that by introducing glass architecture, which lets in the light of the sun, the moon, and the stars, not merely through a few windows, but through every possible wall, which will be made entirely of glass—of coloured glass.'

Bruno Taut, Alpine Architecture, seen from the Monte Generoso, 1919

Weatherland

I only recently got round to reading Alexandra Harris’s Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies and can highly recommend it to readers of this blog.  A book like this will cover some familiar ground – Gawain’s winter journey, Lear goading the storm, Turner’s light, Constable’s clouds, Dickens’ fog – but it is written so well that you never feel like you’re just being told things you already know.  On the Wordsworths, to choose just one example, she points out that their appreciation of weather turned on ‘very specific moments of transformation – when the sun suddenly strikes through cloud, for example, or when a figure is glimpsed through fog.’  She quotes Dorothy noting ‘her favourite birch tree coming to life: “it was yielding to the gusty wind with all its tender twigs, the sun upon it and it glanced in the wind like a flying sunshine show […] It was like a spirit of water.” The earth-rooted tree takes flight in air, dissolves into a water spirit and, and glitters in the sun.’

The whole history of English literature seems to be contained in the book but it cannot of course be completely comprehensive.  There is no George Eliot for instance - just as I was finishing Weatherland, Mrs Plinius was rereading Middlemarch and reminded me that the love between Will and Dorothea finally surfaces during a thunderstorm.  This though is an example of ‘significant weather’, a novelist’s device deplored by Julian Barnes who, I learnt from Weatherland, originally intended his novel Metroland to be called No Weather, since he was determined to avoid using it as a symbol of anything.  The book's scope is restricted to England and there are moments when Alexandra Harris comes across as very English herself (as she did in Romantic Moderns - see my post on 'The bracing glory of our clouds').  She refers, for example, to Milton’s Paradise, where the seasons are fixed and bountiful and ‘Eve lays out a spread for the visiting archangel Raphael’, observing that Eve may have been ‘the only picnicker in history to remain completely free from concerns about the weather.’  Hard to imagine, say, a Californian academic writing this!

Abraham Hondius, The Frozen Thames, 1677

 Source: Wikimedia Commons

Weatherland takes inspiration at various points from Virginia Woolf's Orlando, a book I have referred to here before.  My favourite scenes in Orlando concern the icing over of the Thames, when birds suddenly freeze in the air and Orlando falls in love with a Muscovite princess.  Woolf herself had read an evocative account of the winter of 1608 in Thomas Dekker's The Great Frost: Cold Doings in London, which refers to a new 'pavement of glass' and fish trapped below a thick roof of ice.  Here, from Weatherland's chapter 'On Freezeland Street', are three more responses to those surreal transformations of the city, which only came to an end when the demolition of London Bridge made the river swifter, deeper and permanently liquid. 

• Poetry: John Taylor, Thames boatman and self-styled water-poet, composed The Cold Tearme: Or the Frozen Age: Or the Metamorphosis of the River of Thames in 1621.  He compared the ice to a pastry crust and the freezing wind to a barber's razor, 'turning Thames streames, to hard congealed flakes, / And pearled water drops to Christall cakes.'  He describes visitors coming to the Frost Fair, 'Some for two Pots at Tables, Cards or Dice: / Some slipping in betwixt two cakes of Ice.'  Here he added a rueful note in the margin, 'Witnesse my selfe'.  

• Painting: the view reproduced above is by one of the many artists who came over to England from the Low Countries in the seventeenth century.  'While Englishmen produced diagrammatic engravings of the Frost Fairs, labelling the attractions, Hondius produced an essay in atmosphere.  His expansive sky, worthy of the Netherlands, is flushed with the apricot pinks of a winter sunset.'  Alexandra Harris imagines the effect the frozen river would have had on his imagination.  At around the same time he painted a ship stuck in the pack ice of Greenland, Arctic Adventure.  'The Thames was a noisy, busy river, but in its frozen state it transported Hondius to the desolate edges of the world.'

• Music: John Dryden may have been inspired by the Frost Fair of 1683-4 when he wrote the libretto for Purcell's King Arthur.  Together 'they wanted to freeze and melt the human voice, dramatising in the process the freezing and melting of the the heart.'  The evil Saxon magician Osmond strikes his wand on the ground and magically summons up 'a prospect of winter in frozen countries.'  Then the personification of Cold sings slowly in C minor, chosen as the coldest key, and is followed by a chorus of cold people, whose stuttering singing mimics the chattering of teeth.  The whole masque is conjured to demonstrate the warmth of love, but it is a deception played on Emmeline, who is betrothed to Arthur.  His plan is foiled though and at the end of the opera he is cast into a dungeon whilst Arthur and Emmeline are reunited.  

There are numerous versions of the 'Cold Song' online, some pretty strange.  I've chosen here a  concert version by Andreas Scholl; you can also see a video for this where the singer is dressed in a pale suit, looking lost near some tower blocks.  Incidentally, the Prelude to the Frost Scene was the basis for Michael Nyman's 'Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds' in The Draughtsman's Contract and was recently used again by the Pet Shop Boys in 'Love Is a Bourgeois Construct'.

Naturgemälde

Friedrich Georg Weitsch, Alexander von Humboldt, 1806

Images: Wikimedia Commons

Andrea Wulf has just won another prize for The Invention of Nature and I am not surprised as it is a really good read.  In addition to telling the life of Alexander von Humboldt, she has chapters on other great men who he influenced: Goethe, Jefferson, Bolívar, Darwin, Thoreau, Haeckel, Muir and America's first environmentalist, George Perkins Marsh.  Of course Humboldt was so protean and long-lived that she could have included far more people, at the risk of turning her own book into something the size of Humboldt's thirty-four volume Voyage to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent.  The one time I have referred to Humboldt's influence on this blog was in connection with Carl Gustav Carus and his notion of Earth-life painting - Carus doesn't make it into the book at all.  Here though are some of the artists, writers and composers she does mention, in connection with three of Humboldt's most widely read publications.

In 1808 Humboldt published Views of Nature in Germany and France, combining scientific facts with poetic landscape description.  Reading it, Goethe told him 'that I plunged with you into the wildest regions' and Chateaubriand said that 'you believe you are surfing the waves with him, losing yourself with him in the depths of the woods.'  Later it inspired Darwin, Thoreau and Emerson.  Jules Verne used passages verbatim in his Voyages Extraordinaires, particularly The Mighty Orinoco.  Captain Nemo owned the complete works of Alexander von Humboldt.

In 1814 Humboldt's account of his travels in South America, the Personal Narrative, appeared in England and started to influence writers like Wordsworth, who adapted a passage for his sonnet sequence on the River Duddon. Coleridge may already have read him in the original German; he had spent some time with Wilhelm, the 'brother of the great traveller', in Rome in 1805.  Byron had fun with the idea of Humboldt's cyanometer, a device for measuring the blueness of the sky which he had taken on his travels.  Here are the lines from Don Juan:

Humboldt, 'the first of travellers,' but not
The last, if late accounts be accurate,
 Invented, by some name I have forgot,
As well as the sublime discovery's date,
An airy instrument, with which he sought
To ascertain the atmospheric state,
 By measuring 'the intensity of blue:'
O, Lady Daphne! let me measure you!

Horace Bénédicte de Saussure, cyanometer, 1760

 Saussure (like Humboldt a scientist and mountaineer) originally devised the cyanometer

In 1845, after eleven years' work, Humboldt published Cosmos, a huge success with students, scientists, politicians and even royalty (Prince Albert ordered a copy).  Hector Berlioz declared him 'a 'dazzling writer; the book was so popular among musicians, Berlioz said, that he knew one who had 'read, re-read, pondered and understood' Cosmos during his breaks at opera performances when his colleagues played on.'  In America, Emerson got hold of one of the first copies, Poe was inspired by it to write his visionary last work Eureka, and Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass with a copy of Cosmos on his desk.

 

Frederic Edwin Church, The Heart of the Andes, 1859

On the day Humboldt died in May 1859, New Yorkers were queuing to see a painting he had inspired: The Heart of the Andes by Frederic Edwin Church.  Church had gone to South America and retraced Humboldt's route, returning to paint landscapes that united poetic feeling with scientific accuracy.  The New York Times described him as 'the artistic Humboldt of the new world.'  Church wanted his painting to travel to Berlin so that the old man could see again 'the scenery which delighted his eyes sixty years ago.'  When he heard the news of Humboldt's passing, Church said that it felt as if he had 'lost a friend.'

Alexander von Humboldt, Naturgemälde, 1807

The Invention of Nature begins on a high ridge of Chimborazo, the great extinct volcano that Humboldt climbed in 1802.  Nobody had ever been this high before, not even the early balloonists.  After descending to the Andean foothills, Humboldt began to sketch the first version of his famous Naturgemälde - an image of Chimborazo familiar to those of us professionally interested in infographics but more importantly, as Andrea Wulf emphasises, an encapsulation in one two-by three foot page of Humboldt's new vision of nature as a living whole.  She ends her book with a beautiful quote from his friend Goethe, who compared Humboldt to a 'fountain with many spouts from which streams flow refreshingly and infinitely, so that we only have to place vessels under them.'

The New West

Robert Macfarlane recently chose Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez as 'the book that changed my life'.  He says 'it struck me with the force of revelation the first time I read it, aged 21 and walking the West Coast Trail on Vancouver Island alone over several days.'  Ten years ago he wrote an appreciation of Lopez for The Guardian which perceptively defines him as 'a postmodern devout. His prose - priestly, intense, grace-noted - carries the hushed urgency of the sermon.'  

'Throughout his writings, Lopez returns to the idea that natural landscapes are capable of bestowing a grace upon those who pass through them. Certain landscape forms, in his vision, possess a spiritual correspondence. The stern curve of a mountain slope, a nest of wet stones on a beach, the bent trunk of a wind-blown tree: these abstract shapes can call out in us a goodness we might not have known we possessed. "In a winter-hammered landscape," he writes, "the light creates a feeling of compassion ... it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us."' 

One thing this article doesn't mention, something you wouldn't necessarily realise if Lopez hadn't written about it in his 1998 essay 'Learning to See', is that for fifteen years from the mid-sixties, along with his writing and scientific pursuits, Lopez actually worked as a landscape photographer.  Why did he stop?  A combination of factors: the accidental loss of a portfolio of his best work, the problem of achieving the kind of detail and colour balance he was after, the realisation that he was too focused on focusing his camera to fully experience what he was observing.  He also became uncomfortable with the way nature photography was heading: dazzling images of animals that were no more realistic than the images in Playboy.  However, some wildlife photographers did manage to approach their work with integrity; he lists Frans Lanting, Michio Hoshino, Gary Braasch, Tui De Roy, Jim Brandenburg, Flip Nicklin, Sam Abell, Nick Nichols, Galen Rowell.

Cover of The New West by Robert Adams (1974)

'Learning to See' begins with a surprise invitation from the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth to write an essay on the photography of Robert Adams.  Lopez learns that Adams had suggested his name, despite the fact they'd never met, because he admired his writing.  They have subsequently become friends - an artistic relationship which is discussed in a new book  Other Country: Barry Lopez and the Community of Artists ('for both Lopez and Adams, a worthy artistic expression serves the cultural memory of a community, reminding us how to behave properly toward other people and the land.')  The short essay Lopez wrote for the Fort Worth exhibition suggests that Adams has tried in his images of the American West to get us to consider where we are, and whether we want to be here.  It is evident that we are in a difficult place.  But Adams 'urges us to overcome anger and bitterness, he urges us to be present in the present.  Not to be aloof, unseeing and uncaring.'  This writing certainly has what Robert Macfarlane called the 'hushed urgency of the sermon'.  And Lopez could be referring to his own writings when he says that 'to speak of Adams's work is to speak of faith, of hope, of compassion, of that which is sacred.'

The open pit at Dannemora mine

We saw this tall clock a few weeks ago in Stockholm's Royal Palace.  It dates from the 1760s when ideal landscapes were painted onto all kinds of cabinets - there's no particular connection between the clock itself and the two views here.  Nearby though, in complete contrast, we saw something much more unusual: a mechanical landscape painting which actually incorporates a clock mechanism.  It wasn't possible to photograph without getting some confusing reflections but hopefully this gives you the idea.  It was made in Gothenburg in 1821 and signed 'J. G. Pettersson'.  Far from showing some dreamy Arcadian view, it depicts the Dannemora iron ore mine.

Sadly we didn't get to witness the movable elements of this painting in motion.  You can see one of these, the hoist used to bring up the ore, in the detail above.  This feature is also visible in a watercolour by Elias Martin (below), which was clearly the source for the painting.  Martin, Sweden's first prominent landscape painter, was best known for more Romantic landscapes.  Compare the two views and you will see that the clockmaker added a church as a new focal point, which gives the composition a slightly surreal quality. It contrasts with the black pit in the centre foreground, where we would normally wish to find a limpid pool or shady grove.  Perhaps it was put there to suggest the opposition of heaven and hell, or maybe it was there to strike a note of approval, blessing the labours of the miners and mine owners.  Dannemora mine was established in the Middle Ages and it is hard to imagine the countless hours of work that went into it, until eventually it was shut down in the early nineties.  Recently the mine was bought and reopened in a ceremony featuring King Carl XVI Gustaf but I see it has subsequently ceased operation again.
 

Elias Martin, The open pit at Dannemora, c. 1780-1800

This hybrid clock/painting made we imagine an alternative history for the cuckoo clock without the chalet or woodcutters or water wheels.   Each hour a bird would simply emerge from an attractive Black Forest scene to emit a melodious song.  A few examples of nineteenth century paintings with inbuilt clocks can be seen online, their faces placed where a sun or a flower might be.  You half expect them to start melting like the soft watches in Dalí's The Persistence of Memory.  Clocks within paintings were popular in Austria and Germany but rarely had moving parts. You can view one on Youtube though, in which two hammers beat on an anvil when the hour is struck.  It's a bit hard to make out what the figures in the foreground are doing - is there some nudity involved or is that my imagination?  Again the setting here is industrial - it must have been hard to imagine a clockwork mechanism without thinking of the machines used to channel and reshape nature.  For centuries artists have found ways to convey the diurnal cycle or capture a fleeting instant, but painting, fundamentally, is not a time-based medium.  A clock measures out the hours, a landscape painting should be timeless.  

Bus de la Lum

In 'The Eeriness of the English Landscape' Robert Macfarlane wrote about a growing interest in landscape and the uncanny, with recent books, music and art all exploring places that seem to hide dark secrets.  But if, as he says, this relates to our anxieties about conflict and globalisation it would not be surprising to see non-English artists in other countries pursuing a similar path. In Italy, for example, there is Nico Vascellari, punk musician and visual artist (Macfarlane describes the field as 'a mutated cultural terrain that includes the weird and the punk').  Studio International's description of Vascellari's imagery reminds me of some of the artists referred to by Macfarlane, recent work by Richard Skelton for example: it 'draws on archaic folkloric traditions and animism. He layers both the chaotic and destructive elements of nature with their lush, more abundant counterparts. His pieces suggest or incorporate pelts, leaves, bones, animal parts, rocks, plants and fruits. Items may be charred or distorted, evoking the burning votive figures of his region’s enduring archaic folk rituals.'
 

I was in Manchester this week and visited The Whitworth where Vascellari has installed a forest of screens and projections based on an eerie landscape he knew as a child.  Here's the gallery's summary:

'Bus de la Lum (which means ‘hole of light’) is a natural cavity located in woodland of the Cansiglio plateau. Shrouded in mystery, the void emits a strange light that has long been associated with magic and satanic legend. During World War II it acquired a less mythical but equally terrifying reputation as a death pit for hundreds of prisoners and casualties of war.  Vascellari also connects us to another place, Darvaza (‘Door to Hell’) a vast, burning crater in the desert of Turkmenistan. The stories of these two magical places are interwoven by light, shadow and an extraordinary soundtrack created in collaboration with Turkish-born musician Ghédalia Tazartès.'

I had not heard of either of these places before and looking further into their history it is not hard to see why they might exert a dark fascination.  Bus de la Lum, a limestone sinkhole, may have gained its reputation for emitting fire from the vapour coming off the carcasses of dead animals thrown into the pit.  According to Vascellari, the people living outside the forest 'would see these flames and fantasise that a witch was living inside that hole and burning kids.'  In the Second World War it was the partisans rather than the fascists who pushed people to their death in this pit: civilians as well as German and Italian soldiers were killed - exactly how many is not known.  As for Darvaza, I have embedded a clip of it from Youtube below. Here's what Vascellari told Studio International about it.

'Around 40 years ago, they were drilling to look for gases and, all of a sudden, the ground under the drill collapsed, creating a large hole. And the gas that was coming out of the ground was found to be poisonous. They didn’t know what to do about this, so some geologists were contacted who suggested burning those gases. They expected that, if there was a lot of gas, most likely it would have burned out in four or five days. The reality is that the fire is still burning 40 years later. The name Darvaza, in the local language, means gate of hell.'

The Black Place

'As soon as I saw it, that was my country.  I'd never seen anything like it before, but it fitted me exactly.  It's something that's in the air, it's just different.  The sky is different, the stars are different, the wind is different.'  Compare this to the passage I posted a week ago: Ingmar Bergman discovering Fårö ('this is your landscape, Bergman.  It corresponds to your internal imaginings of forms, proportions, colours, horizons, sounds, silences, lights and reflections.')  The artist this time is Georgia O'Keeffe and the place New Mexico.  She wrote about experiencing a physical connection: 'my skin feels close to the earth when I walk out into the red hills.'  It is tempting to contrast this bodily response with the more cerebral Bergman, but he included 'exertion, relaxation, breathing' in the attributes of his special landscape.  And of course the idea that O'Keeffe's art could be read reductively in terms of her own body has been comprehensively criticised in recent years.  The Guardian's preview of a retrospective here in London was headlined 'Flowers or vaginas? Georgia O’Keeffe Tate show to challenge sexual cliches.'

Alfred Stieglitz, Portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe, 1918

 Source: Wikimedia Commons

We had a good look round this exhibition at Tate Modern yesterday and got the sense of an artist engaged with New Mexico's indigenous inhabitants and culture as well as it's shapes and shadows, hard blue skies and extraordinary colours.  Olivia Laing wrote a great piece about O'Keeffe that describes her first experience of the place. 'Back in 1929 she had spent a summer in Taos with the painter Beck Strand. The pair were taken up by a community of powerfully independent women, among them Mabel Dodge Luhan, the formidable heiress and art patron, and the Hon Dorothy Brett, a stone-deaf Englishwoman who carried a knife in her boots.'  It sounds fun, although O'Keeffe arrived in Taos too late to encounter D. H. Lawrence.  She did paint The Lawrence Tree (1929) though, with a viewpoint right up its trunk and into the night sky.  In Tate Magazine artist Lucy Stein writes of this painting that 'the mental image that this summons of two of the titans of nature-worshipping modernism having cosmic and sexy thoughts beneath this ancient pine is as intoxicating as the picture itself.'

I will conclude here with a longer quote from Olivia Laing on the New Mexico period (I would agree with what she says here of the potential strengths and weaknesses of these paintings).  O'Keeffe's work is in copyright but you can see the painting referred to on The Guardian site. 

“As you come to it over a hill, it looks like a mile of elephants – grey hills all about the same size with almost white sand at their feet,” O’Keeffe wrote of the Black Place, a remote landscape that inspired her more than any other location. The paintings she made there tip geological form over the threshold of abstraction: the serried hills smashed into shards of grey and puce, bifurcated by yolk-coloured cracks or spills of oily black.

'Hills like elephants sounds an echo of Hemingway, and there is something of his habits of compression at work in O’Keeffe, a desire to erase everything extraneous, to convey emotion without confessing it directly. She painted very flat, making surfaces so smooth she once compared the sensation to roller-skating. The risk is blandness, but it can also produce – The Black Place, 1943, say – cleanly assembled structures that quiver with unvoiced feeling.'

The Stockholm Archipelago

This month we spent a week in and around Stockholm.  I took the photograph here from a boat, although we actually spent most of our time in the city rather than exploring the archipelago.  We saw summer houses along the shorelines and shiny white boats with healthy-looking active people on board, but sometimes it felt more like a vast park than the kind of landscape I'd imagined from Strindberg.  We probably needed to get further away, as the narrator says in this passage from Hjalmar Söderberg's brilliant novel Doctor Glas (1905).   In his view the Stockholm Archipelago is overrated...

'A mincemeat landscape, all chopped up.  Little islands, little waterways, little rocky knolls and wretched little trees.  A pale and poverty-stricken landscape, cold colours, mostly grey and blue, and yet not poor enough to have the grandeur of true desolation.  When I hear people praise the archipelago’s natural beauties I always suspect them of having quite other things in mind and on closer examination this suspicion is always confirmed.  One person thinks of the fresh air and fine bathing, another of his sailing boat, a third of the perch-fishing, yet for them all this falls under the rubric of natural beauty.  The other day I was talking to a young girl who was in love with the archipelago but, as our conversation proceeded, it transpired that in point of fact she was thinking of sunsets; possibly also of a student.  She forgot that the sun sets everywhere and that students are mobile.  I do not believe I am wholly insensitive to natural beauty, but for that I must go further afield, to Lake Vättern or Skåne, or else to the sea.  But I rarely have time, and within a radius of twenty or thirty miles of Stockholm I have never seen a landscape to compare with Stockholm itself – with Djurgården or Haga or the pavement overlooking the Stream, outside the Grand.'

The Grand Hotel, Stockholm, in 1901.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The 'Stream' is Paul Britten Austin's translation of the Strøm, the waters of Saltsjön at the centre of Stockholm.

The rocks of Fårö

'My ties with Fårö have several origins.  The first was intuitive. This is your landscape, Bergman.  It corresponds to your internal imaginings of forms, proportions, colours, horizons, sounds, silences, lights and reflections.  Security is here.  Don't ask why. Explanations are clumsy rationalisations with hindsight. In, for instance, your profession you look for simplification, proportion, exertion, relaxation, breathing.  The Fårö landscape gives you a wealth of all that.'

- Ingmar Bergman in his autobiography The Magic Lantern (1987, trans. Joan Tate)

View from the Bergmancenter on Fårö

This notion of finding ones ideal landscape is an interesting one and prompts me to wonder what my own might be.  Bergman spent much of his life in theatres and the island of Fårö, with its rocks and trees and open skies, seems at first to be a very different kind of space.  But as he says here, it suited his outlook on directing as well as the deeper need for a retreat which we often see in creative artists.  Bergman was only persuaded to visit Fårö in the first place when Svensk Filmindustri requested that he consider an alternative to Orkney as a setting for Through a Glass Darkly (1961).  He made three more films there, along with two documentaries about life on the island and the TV series Scenes From a Marriage (1973), which led to an upsurge in the Swedish divorce rate and was apparently an inspiration for Dallas.
 
It might be thought that Bergman filmed more often on Fårö than he actually did because rocky coastal settings are so associated with his work.  In a post I wrote just after he died I referred to the chess game on the beach in The Seventh Seal, but this was made four years before he had set foot on the island.  I was only able to quote a description of Fårö then; now I have been myself and walked, for example, the windswept shore at Langhammars, with its strange rock formations, that Bergman used for the final scene in Shame (1968).  In this the couple – Liv Ullman and Max Von Sidow - wait for a boat which they hope will take them and other refugees away from their war-torn country.  The film ends with them adrift in a grey featureless sea.

 

One of the limestone stacks ('rauks') at Langhammars

Perhaps another reason we associate Bergman so strongly with Fårö is the continuing fascination with Persona, which is I think, after The Seventh Seal, his most famous and iconic film (both are parodied in Woody Allen’s Love and Death).  Fårö's Bergmancenter currently has an exhibition marking its fiftieth anniversary.  Among the exhibits are Liv Ullman’s camera, Bibi Andersson’s shades and some atmospheric behind-the-scenes colour photographs of a film that is hard to imagine in anything other than beautifully-lit black and white.  Sadly it is not possible to visit the actual house used in Persona, situated on the rocky eastern shore of Fårö, where the troubled actress played by Liv Ullman withdraws from the world.  This no longer survives.

Liv Ullman on the rocks of Fårö in Persona (1966)

Voices from the Land

I don't think I've ever embedded a Ted Talk before.  This one covers some of the key points Bernie Krause makes in his recent book The Great Animal Orchestra.  The book's title comes from an insight that came to him after several years of field recording: different species have evolved to fit within their own acoustic bandwidth, so that the natural soundscape is structured like orchestral music. Krause distinguishes the biophony, sounds of living organisms, from the geophony, those natural sounds that spring from the wind, water and earth.  The geophony is the music of the underlying landscape.  In his chapter 'Voices from the Land' Krause recalls a revelatory experience of geophonic sound, back in 1971 when he was still recording with Paul Beaver (their album In a Wild Sanctuary, a pioneering fusion of synthesised music and field recording, had been released the previous year).  One frosty October day Krause was taken by a Nez Percé elder to the edge of a stream feeding Lake Wallowa in northeastern Oregon.

'After about half an hour, the wind began to funnel down from the high southern pass, gaining force with each passing moment.  A Venturi effect caused the gusts passing upstream through the narrow gorge to compress into a vigorous breeze that swept past our crouched bodies, the combined temperature and windchill now making us decidedly uncomfortable.  Then it happened.  Sounds that seemed to come from a giant pipe organ suddenly engulfed us.  The effect wasn't a chord exactly, but rather a combination of tones, sighs, and midrange groans that played off each other, sometimes setting strange beats into resonance as they nearly matched one another in pitch.  At the same time they created complex harmonic overtones, augmented by reverberations coming off the lake and the surrounding mountains.  At those moments the tone clusters, becoming quite loud, grew strangely dissonant and overwhelmed every other sensation.'

What was the source of this strange soundscape?  Krause relates that he was led to the river bank and shown a cluster of reeds, broken over time by the action of the elements into different lengths.  Those reeds with open holes at the top were played by the wind like flutes.  The Nez Percé elder took out a knife and made himself a flute our of a reed, explaining that this sound was the origin of the music of his people.