Blossoms scattering on echoes

In April 2018 I wrote a blog post here about blossom viewing: 'last weekend at Kew Gardens the cherry trees were in full bloom. It prompted me to organise for last night a small blossom viewing gathering at our house (we actually have a crab apple tree, but it's a perfectly good stand-in).' We are holding another gathering tomorrow and this time I was inspired by the cherry trees in Regent's Park (see above). Im preparation I have been writing out some of my favourite translated Japanese blossom poems on cards decorated with fallen petals. For example, this one by Nōin (988-1050) in which the falling flowers suggest a mountain soundscape: 

  To a mountain village 

    at nightfall on a spring day

      I came and saw this: 

  blossoms scattering on echoes

    from the vespers bell.*

Kenneth Rexroth included a version in his One Hundred More Poems from the Japanese, translating the last lines as petals scattering 'at the boom of the evening temple bell' which suggests they are taking fright at the sudden sound in a quiet place.

One of the best sources for blossom poetry is Ki no Tsurayuki (872-945), a poet whose work I've discussed on this blog before. He too has one about arriving at night on a spring day and looking for lodging - when he sleeps the blossom continues to fall even in his dream. In another waka the 'wake of the breeze' scatters petals into wavelets that 'ripple out into the waterless sky.' And in another, the wind is not cold, but the scattering cherry blossoms still resemble a snow flurry. Rexroth's One Hundred More Poems has one in which the poet loses his way in the confusion of so many petals falling. And the Met has a Ki no Tsurayuki blossom poem written out in the 17th century on decorated paper:

  The scent of blossoms 

    has soaked ever deeper

      into our robes

  as breezes come and go

    in the shade of the trees.    

 

^*Steven Carter (editor), Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford University Press 1991), page 134. I try not to quote whole poems but others have done so already, so I've included it here.

The endless redrawn shoreline

Sean Scully, Aran, 2005

Sean Scully was the subject of a profile in the Guardian earlier this year with a clickbaity headline: ''I’m the product of a smashed-up family': how Sean Scully became the greatest abstract painter alive.' Of course abstract painters often seek inspiration for forms, rhythm and colour from landscape, and Scully is one such artist. You can see this in various ways at the Lisson Gallery's exhibition, The Nature of Art, which I visited last month. Aran (2005), for example, is a grid of the dry stone walls I have explored and photographed myself (see my earlier post 'Sentences on the sea', with quotes from Tim Robinson). He produced a book of these images, Walls of Aran, which has an introduction by Colm Tóibín. Scully was born in Ireland but grew up in London and did manual jobs while training to be an artist - he has talked about how he enjoyed seeing the forms made by stacking cardboard boxes in a factory. It is obvious why these carefully stacked stones of Aran would appeal to him.  

Landscape has most clearly influenced Scully's art in the Landlines series. An article in the Smithsonian magazine explains the origin of these works. 

It was 1999 when the artist Sean Scully approached the edge of a grassy cliff in Norfolk, England, out to the blue-green of the North Sea and the steely gray sky above it. “I saw a beautiful cliff and a very unusual possibility for a composition,” he says. The resulting photograph Land Sea Sky presented those three elements in roughly equal stripes across the pictorial space. ... “I try to paint this, this sense of the elemental coming together of land and sea, sky and land, of blocks coming together side by side, stacked in horizon lines endlessly beginning and ending,” he says, “the way the blocks of the world hug each other and brush up against each other, their weight, their air, their color, and the soft uncertain space between them.”

I have taken many photographs over the years of land, sea and sky forming bands of colours - I imagine we all have. I like the way you can vary the components - in Sussex you can also look back from the shoreline to photograph beach, cliffs and sky: grey, white and blue. The Lisson exhibition includes some of Scully's photographs, like Landline 1999 (brown, white, blue - land, surf, sea) and Landline (Lima Sunset) (2019) where, like Hiroshi Sugimoto, he just has two rectangles of sea and sky. Artists have been painting these bands of colour on the coast since The Monk and the Sea - on this blog I've mentioned Strindberg's Coastal Landscape II (1903) and Spilliaert's, Seascape Seen from Mariakerke (1909), but there was also Seurat at Gravelines, Richard Diebenkorn at Ocean Park, Patrick Heron at St. Ives, Brice Marden's Sea Paintings and Gerhard Richter's Seascapes. You could design a fascinating exhibition bringing images like these together. A few years ago Scully was invited to show new work at the National Gallery and his exhibition 'Sea Star' also included a near-abstract canvas by Turner, The Evening Star (1830).

Sean Scully, Natured (the endless redrawn shoreline) 12.22.25, 2025

Today I was in town again on my way to a Bernd and Hilla Becher show (excellent, but not really landscape art so I can't discuss it here) and walked through Hanover Square, where I took the photo below. This is a sculptural version of the Landline series, made from five blocks of marble. I guess it is always hard to write about art like this convincingly - when it was installed Scully explained that "marble is a natural material that is taken from the ground and has, as a consequence, a profound relationship with Nature." Hmm. Maybe he was partly thinking that it contrasts with the manufactured bronze used to cast the statue of William Pitt that stands across the road from it? The press release explained that 'the selected marbles translate the layered landscape of Hanover Square itself, the new gardens and surrounding buildings - the grey, sand and ochre of the footways and buildings, and the greens and blue- greens of the trees.' And you can see this in my image below, if you focus on the buildings and imagine more foliage and a more typical grey London day. Scully has simplified a complex townscape into a layering of colours resembling the naturally abstract views we experience on the edge of the sea.    

Sean Scully, Landline, 2023

Fire and Water

Today I paid a second visit to the Tate's Turner & Constable exhibition. The Guardian paraphrased Adrian Searle's review as 'boiling portentous skies versus two men and a dog' and provided the verdict upfront: 'JMW Turner is beaten by John Constable in this mighty show.' Few other reviewers were tempted to play the game of siding with one or the other, although The Tatler went for Turner - 'he was the out-and-out winner.' I don't think there's much doubt they were the two greatest landscape painters of their era - it's not like the 'who is best, Blur or Oasis?' debate, where the sensible verdict was always "Pulp". But their differences continue to fascinate - as the wall text above states one was 'all truth', the other 'poetry' and, as can clearly be seen at the Tate, where Constable's clouds and light-flecked trees and rivers sit alongside Turner's hazy, sunset vistas, 'one is silver, the other gold.'

At the risk of being annoying, I thought I would take the absurdity of ranking these two artists seriously and apply the crass five star system we are familiar with from movie reviews. I wasn't sure how this would come out, although I was expecting to side with poetry over truth, or what George Shaw describes in the exhibition film as Turner's elemental alignment with the air, over Constable's allegiance to the earth. In the first room of early work, leaving aside sketchbooks, each artist had 12 paintings and Turner edges it (37 versus 34, or 3.1 v 2.8 on average, per painting). We then move to two Turner and two Constable rooms. Turner's average for some lovely watercolours is brought down to 2.9 by four less impressive oil sketches, but he gets a 3.2 for his Alpine scenes. Constable 'in the outdoors' includes some of his less interesting sketches (2.6) but the room devoted to fields and skies features his celebrated cloud studies and paintings around Dedham (3.2). Overall, Turner is just in the lead as we come to a room called 'The Exhibition' which pits four Constables against five Turners. Here at least I have to agree with Searle, the perfection of Constable's The White Horse and sheer energy in his The Leaping Horse make him the clear winner.  

John Constable, Watermeadows at Salisbury, 1820

The next display, 'Fire and Water', includes this serene view of the landscape near Salisbury. As you look at it, you almost can't believe you're not looking at real water. The wall text explains that in 1830 it got accidentally assessed as a potential Royal Academy exhibit, while Constable was on the committee. His colleagues 'condemned it as 'a poor thing' that was 'very green'. Perhaps out of embarrassment, Constable stayed quiet.' Well it got five stars from me and Constable wins this room, with his famous views of Salisbury Cathedral and Hadleigh Castle easily beating Turner's Palace of Caligula. The next room has a clip from the Mike Leigh film Mr. Turner, which I wrote about here in 2015. Back then I quoted a review of an earlier Tate exhibition (in 2009) which viewed the artists as rivals, showing Constable's Opening of Waterloo Bridge alongside the Turner seascape it had overshadowed at the Royal Academy, until Turner cheekily added a red buoy on varnishing day. The Constable is on show here too, along with some of his later works which I don't find very appealing (2.4). The late Turners - Venice, the Blue Rigi, the swirling Snow Storm are always astonishing (3.9). The last room, 'Landscape and Memory' has one of my favourite paintings, Turner's Norham Castle, Sunrise, but also reminds you of the variety of Constable's work - from his detailed drawing of trees on Hampstead Heath to his dramatic depiction of Stonehenge (Turner 3.5, Constable 3.7). 

So who came out on top? Well, Constable got a grand total of 221. And Turner's scores added up to... 221 as well! However, Constable, by my reckoning, had 72 paintings in the show and Turner just 66, so I declare Turner the winner.

A place with a pond

A place with a pond, in the fifth month when the rains are falling, is a very moving thing. It's deeply affecting to sit for hours on end staring out at the garden, a sea of monochrome soft green with the pond's water as deep green as the sweet flag and reeds that crowd it, and the heavy rain clouds hanging above. Indeed all places with ponds are at all times moving and delightful, and of course this is so too on winter mornings when the water is frozen over. Rather than a carefully tended pond, I find delightful the sort that have been left neglected to the rampant water weed, where patches of reflected moonlight gleam whitely on the water here and there between the swathes of green.
All moonlight is moving, wherever it may be.

- The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon (trans. Meredith McKinney 

I don't seem to have ever devoted a blog post to Sei Shōnagon, whose Pillow Book has been an inexhaustible source of pleasure over the years. Many of her entries on landscape are simple lists of place names she found attractive. As McKinney says in his notes, 'the charm mostly lies in the poetic associations of the name, and/or its meaning. The place itself as a geographical entity is not the point.' In an earlier section of the book, she describes why she highlights nine favourite ponds.

1. Katsumata Pond - Sei Shōnagona simply names this place, which features in the Man'yōshū collection of waka poems. It was near Toshodaiji and Yakushiji Temples in Nara.
2. Iware Pond - the possible remains of this pond in Nara were uncovered a few years ago. There is a monument there with lines from a poem written by a son of the emperor: “This is my last chance to see the ducks singing in the Iware Pond as I am destined to die today.”
3. Nieno Pond - this was somewhere Sei Shōnagon visited while on a pilgrimage to Hase. 'It was marvellous to see seemingly endless flocks of water birds rising noisily from this pond.'
4. Waterless Pond - so called because it sometimes dried up. It sounds very similar to the pond on Blackheath that I wrote about here recently. 
5. Sarusawa Pond - a 'special place' because it features in poems composed for an emperor to mourn one of the Palace Maidens, who had drowned herself. Sei Shōnagon quotes a memorable line attributed to Hitomoro that describes 'her hair tangled as if in sleep.'
6. 'Divine Presence Pond' - Shōnagon doesn't know why this one got its name. 
7. Sayama Pond - another literary site. She recalls a poet who said you can draw burr reed out of the water but if you to try to draw him from his lover's bed, 'ah I break'. 
8. Koinuma Pond - 'there's also Koinuma Pond' is all she says and I'm not sure what was special about this place.
9. Hara Pond - the last pond in her list was associated with a popular song: 'oh do not cut the jewelled weeds.'

Hasui Kawase, Sarusawa Pond, Nara, 1935

It would of course be possible to come up with similar lists of favourite ponds in England, but I will conclude here with just one example. Last summer I visited Silent Pool in Surrey, which has an evocative Japanese sounding name, although as our Rough Guide explained, it is not completely silent because you can hear traffic from the road. The water was a vivid green with pondweed, eelgrass and the reflections of surrounding trees in full leaf. The guidebook records a folk legend associated with this place that Sei Shōnagon might have appreciated: ‘A woodman's daughter was bathing in the Silent Pool when a caddish nobleman appeared. He rode his horse into the water to reach her and she drowned trying to escape him. Her father found the body and the nobleman’s hat floating on the water, which, in a sinister twist, bore the emblem of Prince John, suggesting that the future king of England was the culprit.’

Silent Pool, August 2025

Borgøya Island

I just finished reading this wonderfully depressing novel by Jon Fosse. It is about the Norwegian landscape painter Lars Hertervig (1830-1902), whose strange paintings I wrote about here a decade ago. I was writing then about a TV programme in which Andrew Graham-Dixon suggested that Hertervig's traumatic move from a poor farm on the west coast of Norway to the city of Düsseldorf was like the shock of Norway's transition from a rural backwater to a modern state. Here's how I related the artist's sad story, which inspired John Fosse's Melancholy I-II:

One day, Hertervig, who had fallen in love with the beautiful daughter of his landlady in Düsseldorf, was told that a rendezvous had been arranged with her. But when he arrived to meet her he found no one there but a bunch of bullying, mocking students. This practical joke contributed to a depression which led him to return to Norway, where he was placed in the asylum at Gaustad. After eighteen months, 'incurably insane', Hertervig went home to his family.

That terrible bullying experience at the hands of his fellow painters is powerfully evoked through interior monologue in the first part of the book. In Part 2 we find Hertervig suffering in the Gaustad asylum, while Part 3 is told from the perspective of a modern-day writer who has an emotional, quasi-religious experience in front of Hertervig's painting Borgøya Island. The fourth part, Melancholy II, was added in 1996 and is perhaps the most upsetting section of all, tracing the thoughts of Hertervig's elderly, incontinent sister during the course of one afternoon, soon after his death in 1902.

Lars Hertervig, Borgøya Island, 1867

While reading the first part of the novel, set on that fateful day in the Autumn of 1853, I was curious to know more about the "painters who can't paint", as Hertervig describes his contemporaries. He excludes from this judgement Hans Bude, the Düsseldorf Art Academy's young Norwegian tutor. Hertervig, in the novel, frets about whether Bude will criticise his art, although when they meet each other in the street Bude is encouraging. It wasn't artistic criticism that precipitated Hertervig's breakdown. Fosse also mentions 'Tidemann' who I took to be Adolph Tidemand, another older Norwegian artist. Tidemand's talent for figure painting led him to collaborate with Gude on landscape scenes like the Bridal Procession I have reproduced below. The place where all these painters used to meet up in Düsseldorf was Malkasten, which I imagined as a large beer hall full of students. In fact it was a renowned artist's association ('Malkasten' means Painter's Box) which in Hertervig's day hired out restaurant rooms. Malkasten was founded in 1848 and is still going today, having undergone numerous changes over the years (they now have a bar 'where art meets gastronomy').

Adolph Tidemand and Hans Gude, Bridal Procession on the Hardangerfjord, 1848 

When Hertervig first enters Malkasten, already in a fragile state, he encounters 'Alfred', who will later go out of his way to deceive him into thinking Helene, the girl he loves, is sitting somewhere at the back of the bar. There were a few real artists at that time called Alfred, but I am guessing he is not based on an actual person? (If any Fosse or Hertervig experts are reading this, feel free to put me right!) Another artist we encounter is 'Müller' who must be Morten Müller (1828-1911), a painter whose views of fjords and pine forests can be seen in Norway's National Gallery. 'Capellen' is briefly mentioned too, presumably August Capellen (1827-52) although he died of cancer the year before the novel is set and doesn't appear as a character. Alfred's main accomplice is 'Bodom' and he too was a real person, the Norwegian landscape painter Erik Bodom (1829-79) who Hertervig admits "can paint. But Bodom is not as good a painter as I am." 

Erik Bodom, Landscape with a Waterfall, 1855

As Hertervig talks to Bodom he is increasingly confused with sexual delusions, visions of Helene and images from his past life on Borgøya Island. Something is clearly wrong... 

This is your first time at Malkasten, isn't it, he says.
And I look straight into Bodom's eyes, and his eyes are grinning, I see Bodom's eyes grinning and just like that his eyes turn into bog-holes, black, wet, and then someone pulling, sinking, splashing in the bog, hard, the hand moves fast, pulls up, down, tightens, tightens, and I can't pull my foot free and it's stuck and then, up ahead, is the light that sucks and comes at me and pulls me down...

Listening to Insects at Dōkan Hill

Utagawa Hiroshige, Listening to Insects at Dōkan Hill, 

from the series Famous Places in the Eastern Capital, 1835-1845 

This is one of the prints that was on display in the British Museum's exhibition Hiroshige: artist of the open road last year. Lafcadio Hearn published an essay on 'insect musicians' and the listening practices surrounding them in his collection Exotics and Retrospectives (1898):

There are charming references to singing-insects in poetical collections made during the tenth century, and doubtless containing many compositions of a yet earlier period. And just as places famous for cherry, plum, or other blossoming trees, are still regularly visited every year by thousands and tens of thousands, merely for the delight of seeing the flowers in their seasons,—so in ancient times city-dwellers made autumn excursions to country-districts simply for the pleasure of hearing the chirruping choruses of crickets and of locusts,—the night-singers especially. Centuries ago places were noted as pleasure-resorts solely because of this melodious attraction;—such were Musashino (now Tōkyō), Yatano in the province of Echizen, and Mano in the province of Ōmi. Somewhat later, probably, people discovered that each of the principal species of singing-insects haunted by preference some particular locality, where its peculiar chanting could be heard to the best advantage; and eventually no less than eleven places became famous throughout Japan for different kinds of insect-music. [He goes on to list them...]

The Hiroshige print is analysed in a 2023 acoustic ecology paper by soundscape researcher Keiko Torigoe. She includes a description of Dōkan Hill from the Edo Meisho Zue (1834-6).

There are many medicinal herbs in this area, and people who gather medicines always come here. Especially in autumn, pine insects and bell ringers make exquisite sounds. Therefore, courtesans and persons of elegance and refinement all come here to recite poems in the winds and sing songs under the moon, appreciating the sound of the insects.

The pine insect is the matsumushi 'much esteemed for the peculiar clearness and sweetness of its notes', according to Hearn, and the bell ringer is the suzumushi which 'in certain lonesome places might easily be mistaken,—as it has been by myself more than once,—for the sound of rapids.' You can hear what they sound like on YouTube: here are links for the pine cricket and bell cricket. There is actually a temple in Kyoto known as Suzumushidera because the monks keep bell crickets there to sing all year round.  

Dōkan Hill features in other 19th century prints. Hiroshige's son-in-law Suzuki Chinpei (Hiroshige II) composed a scene similar to the one above in 1864: Listening to insects on Dōkan Hill. There is a comic 1859 scene by Utagawa Hirokage called Catching fireflies at Mount Dōkan, which the Library of Congress describes as showing 'four men drinking alcoholic beverages in a field at night' (one of them is rolling round, clearly pissed as a pudding). And in 1884 Kobayashi Kiyochika depicted a couple climbing the hill to enjoy the views, whilst in the foreground a horse looks startled, perhaps by the sight of some huge white daikon radishes lying on the floor. I'll end here with another example: a simple and rather lovely pink and turquoise view of the landscape below Dōkan Hill, by Hiroshige himself.    

Utagawa Hiroshige, Below Dokan Hill, 

from the series Twelve Views of Edo, c. 1835 

Over stones, under alders

 

At the Small Publishers Fair last year I caught a reading by John Bevis from A Surrey Naturalist, his new collection of eighty found poems derived from an old book by the broadcaster and conservationist Eric Parker. Afterwards I talked to John and his publisher Colin Sackett about the techniques of found poetry and the challenges of writing about the landscape of your childhood. His main method was erasure, where poems emerge from the original work by retaining only a few words, in their original order, arranged into stanzas. I liked his simple idea for 'Swifts innumerable', a poem where everything is erased but the punctuation, which floats freely on the page like swifts glimpsed in a cloudy sky. He also used a Jonathan Williams-style cutout - 'a piece of card, smaller than a postcard, with a central rectangle about the size of a matchbox removed' - and an approach inspired by stargazing where he would visually sweep Parker's pages in order to spot interesting words in his peripheral vision. 

Having grown up in Brighton, I always viewed Surrey as the place you had to pass through on the way to London. John addresses the stereotypical view of Surrey in his introduction and regrets that it is 'pretty much at the bottom of the heap in terms of poetic credibility, authenticity of voice, rootedness.' It has a strong association with stories of childhood - Lewis Carroll, J. M. Barrie, E. H. Shepard. I remember as a teenage Tolkien fan reading Michael Moorcock's description of the Shire (in 'Epic Pooh') as 'a Surrey of the mind', and thinking how unfair it was to compare Middle Earth to a place I associated with retired bankers. However, as John points out, there were always elements of industry here and links to writers like Wells and Huxley who had darker visions of humanity. Eric Parker's book, published in 1952, covers this cultural history but also provided fresh and vivid observations of nature that John felt he could rework into poems evoking the landscape of his childhood whilst bypassing the selectivity of memory.

A Surrey Naturalist (this version but evidently the original too) varies its approach from chapter to chapter, providing different lenses on the county and its topography. I particularly enjoyed a section called 'Country Chances', the first page of which is reproduced on the Uniformbooks website. You can see there the Ian Hamilton Finlayesque 'Visitors from Sea', a brief meditation on travel in 'Thought of a Journey' and the enigmatic 'Riddles of a Lawn'.  Later in the chapter there is a poem called 'Cuttings of Hazel' that turns Parker into a haiku poet: 'Difficult to choose / a carpet of snow // over a carpet / of primroses.' I will end here by quoting a poem on the Surrey landscape (sticking, as ever, to my blog's theme), from the chapter 'Rivers and Streams'. I was briefly tempted to create my own composite found poem from John's, but will spare you this further level of condensation and abstraction. You could also, I suppose, move in the opposite direction and re-imagine Parker's chapter based solely on his found texts, but the resulting descriptions would no doubt let back in that 'Surrey of the mind' we all carry around with us. 

Over stones, under alders. Under oaks, dun water.
Above, the sun. More beyond.
Dried up in summer, the drought of last summer.
Dried up in spring, and dry in summer.
Heard of streams: a bubbling melody in three bars, of moaning, loud cries, whoop and whirr.
To find the source, to trace the river to a pond, to some fish, to swimming.

This photograph was taken in August last year, when I was walking with my sons by Tillingbourne in the Surrey Hills.  Sunlight on dun water...  

Deposition

 

Lucy Raven, Deposition, Dam Breach, 16, 2024

This picture, which I saw yesterday at the Lisson Gallery in London, appears to show a mountain landscape. However, it is actually a byproduct of a more ambitious work of landscape art that I saw last November at the Barbican: Lucy Raven's film Murderers Bar (2025). I have written here before about art addressing the environmental impacts of dams; this film does the opposite - celebrating the undamming of the Klamath River in Northern California. At the Barbican I arrived at just the right time to watch drone footage of the wider landscape and workers laying dynamite. Then, the loud detonation arrives making you jump (I stayed to watch it again and managed to film it on my phone - see below). The beauty of the film really becomes apparent as her camera follows the wave of water flooding through miles of the old river valley, all the way to the Pacific Ocean. 'The film then follows the river back upstream through the drained reservoir, a stark terrain of sediment cut by the new path of the river that will be transformed by life in years to come. The original drowned landscape is now revealed as potential'.    

At the Lisson Gallery (until the end of this month) there are three Deposition panels and a video piece showing the water and mud from which gave rise to them. What they are is prints that reveal part of the working process behind the film. 'By constructing a large steel and wooden channel lined with expanses of silk, Raven staged smaller-scale floods and dam breaches in a studio environment, before revealing the aftermath, traced as sedimentary imprints or chance echoes on fabric sidewalls.' The resulting images are made of the same raw materials - sand, mud, cement, salt water - that she filmed at the Klamath River, but they bear no visual link to the landscape. The way they relate to the main film reminded me of the sketches artists used to make in preparing for major landscape paintings, or the documentary material assembled and exhibited by land artists. Murderers Bar itself is also only a part of a whole, as it represents the final installment of Raven's series The Drumfire. As an ArtReview article explains, this this focuses 'on how the landscape’s natural materials are placed under pressure, broken apart, reconstituted.' Earlier videos feature mining in Idaho and military detonations in New Mexico. You can see her talk about all this in a short film, Pressure & Release, at Art 21.

Mimic Pond

This is a photograph I took on Boxing Day of Mounts Pond on Blackheath. The small mound with trees behind it is now called Whitfield Mount after the eighteenth century open air preacher, but has been a radical landmark since the middle ages. Legend has it that John Ball made his famous speech here during the Peasants’ Revolt, Cornish rebels gathered on it in 1497 and later the Chartists and Suffragettes met at the spot, aware of its tradition as a rallying point for dissent. The pond is seasonal, emerging in winter and disappearing in the summer. Currently, as you can see, it is little more than a large puddle, with crows circling and using it as a bath.

I went to look at this small section of London landscape because I had just read Carol Watts' excellent book of poems about it, Mimic Pond. The cover shows grass poking through the shallow water like lines of verse and in the poem she compares the black crows hovering over winter ice to 'black script' or 'notes on a stave'. Her title comes from Henry David Thoreau's Journal for 16 April 1852 - 'here is a mimic sea - with its gulls' (he was describing the look of a meadow after rain and snow melt). Other writers she draws on, whose work I've mention before on this blog, include Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, Francis Ponge, Gary Snyder and Allen Fisher. Her poems cover a year of close observation and at about this time she saw the pond as 'a replication of expanses / on different scales, wondering / what the pond sees in the crow / or the crow, as it flies, sees / in the pond / also in motion.'

I went to an excellent online talk by Carol Watts a couple of years ago, 'Pond weathers and inventories: practices of eco-attention in making poetry', but have unfortunately mislaid the notes I made at the time. If I ever come across them I'll amend this blog post... Instead, I'll direct you to an excellent long review of Mimic Pond by Susie Campbell at Long Poem Magazine. She notes, for example, that its 'language fluctuates through shifting levels of meaning and strange reversals, an active playful thinking about pond in writing', and that the rhythms of the poetry sequence 'communicate a quiet spaciousness.'

'Not the restless, trickster shiftings of the pond itself but more like the wheeling, diurnal rhythms of earth and sky, suggesting perhaps that the restless energies of the pond are held within the bigger rhythms of the universe. We feel in them the earth’s curves and parabolas, a recurring motif throughout the collection. Read aloud, these rhythms create a sense of how the great rise and fall of the universe is mirrored in the restless turbulence of the pond.' 

End of the Glacier, Upper Grindelwald

I recently read this lovely new book about the glacier pictures of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. I've written about these before: the 1949 trip to Grindelwald features in the new Mark Cousins film I wrote about last October (he has an essay in The Glaciers); prior to that, in 2018, I went to see some of the paintings and sketches in an exhibition at the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings. Here, as a special treat for the geographers amongst you, I am going to highlight the glacial features identified by Peter Nienow in his essay 'Art and Ice Loss: A Glaciologist's look at Wilhelmina Barns-Graham's Glaciers.'

Blue Ice

'Dense, clean glacier light absorbs the long (red) wavelengths of light while at the same time scattering the the short wave blue-light.' You can see this in her most famous glacier painting, the Tate's Glacier Crystal, Grindelwald (1950). Nienow wonders whether Barns-Graham visited one of those tourist glacier tunnels where you can enter and marvel at this blue light. I imagine none of these will be left soon, but we visited the one they have at Titlis in Switzerland back in 2017.  

Moulins and Dolines

Many of her paintings have 'blue circular swirls and holes in the ice, clearly visible in for example Glacier Vortex (1950', the image you can see above. Meltwater ponds develop at the start of summer and then drain away leaving the depressions in ice called dolines. Water flowing down through the glacier creates vertical moulins and Nienow tells us that 'in the Alps, I have plumbed these precipitous pipes.' He mentions the unnervingly large examples they have on the Greenland glacier, which reminded my of the chapter in Robert MacFarlane's Underland where he is let down into one on a rope and balances himself on a spear-like blade of ice before being pulled to safety. 

Crevasses

The much-produced photograph of Barns-Graham and the Brotherton family on holiday in May 1949 climbing the Upper Grindelwald Glacier shows them threading their way upwards joined by a rope, with crevasses visible on either side. The two Brotherton boys look as if they are still wearing their school uniform of shorts and long socks and their father has a tweed jacket on. Crevasses feature in the dramatic paintings of Romantic artists like Thomas Fearnley, but Barns-Graham wasn't interested in panoramic views. She was more concerned with geometry and form, and several of her 1949 glacier studies show patterns of crevasses separating irregular blocks of ice.

Superglacial debris

Her paintings are dominated by greys, blues and white but there are sometimes patches of brown which represent the colours of rock that has fallen onto the surface of the glacier. Nienow reproduces Glacier, Rock Forms (1950 which has 'possible evidence of iron-oxide-stained rock debris' in it. Some of these fallen boulders eventually end up perched on pedestals of ice like natural sculptures, resembling the work of her contemporaries in St. Ives.  

Foliation

Foliation is the process by which fine lines in the ice are created, marking summer periods when dust, pollen and insects collect on the surface of the snow. Once these layers become ice and start moving downhill, they can get folded and fractured, creating patterns that Barns-Graham reproduced in sketches like End of the Glacier, Upper Grindelwald. I'm sure she would have loved the glacier we visited in Iceland, where the ice was covered in black volcanic dust.

Peter Nienow's essay ends on an elegiac note with statistics on glacial retreat in Switzerland. He says they lost 10% of their ice volume between 2021 and 2023. Wow. That is such a short period - it only seems like yesterday I was reporting here on our visit to the Swiss mountains in 2017. Sadly, nobody now can see what Wilhelmina Barns-Graham saw. 'The stunning ice fall that she explored and drew inspiration from as it tumbled down towards the outskirts of Grindelwald village is no more.'

Twenty Years of Some Landscapes

Richard Long, Ten Days Walking and Sleeping on Natural Ground (1986)

- one of three screenprints. 

Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of this blog and the first people I ever wrote about were Hamish Fulton and Richard Long. Hamish Fulton is still making walks in the landscape - he led one recently as part of a nationwide nature action day. Richard Long is also still very active and celebrated his eightieth birthday this year. His Mud Sun can currently be seen in the refurbished National Gallery, where it is installed 'as a bridge between early paintings and works by High Renaissance artists in the collection.' Meanwhile Tate Modern has an 'Artist Room' devoted to work by Long, including the text piece I photographed above. Tate Modern is celebrating its own anniversary this year - it opened twenty-five years ago with a thematic display that juxtaposed Richard Long and Claude Monet under 'Landscape, Matter, Environment'. This did Long no favours and indeed Adrian Searle called it the curators' 'most glaringly awful moment ... the large, tremblingly beautiful Monet waterlily painting, which for many years hung in the National Gallery, opposite a wall-filling black and white splattery drawing by Richard Long.' However, I remember liking the idea of muddling up different kinds of art in this way. My blog has always jumped around and alighted on anybody that could be classified under the broad headings of 'landscape' and 'culture'.   

That first post I wrote in November 2005 referred to Ubuweb, a site that's been going longer than my blog (I'm pleased to see the link still works). They have a short sound file in which Long can be heard reading his 1988 text work Desert Circle:

Camel dropping to thorn. Thorn to yellow flower. Yellow flower to ant. Ant to white stone. White stone to black stone. Black stone to stick. Stick to goat’s horn. Goat’s horn so seed pod. Seed pod to cricket. Cricket to seed. Seed to orange stone. Orange stone to beetle. Beetle to place of the camel dropping.

The other sound piece I referenced was Hamish Fulton's Seven Days and Seven Nights Camping in a Wood, Cairngorms, Scotland, March 1985. Fulton once said 'numbers are both of significance and no significance', but also 'I am curious about the number seven'.* I could choose lots of other examples from his walks that use the number seven. This one below signifies nothing about the Japanese landscape but does remind me of the way words fall like rain in visual poetry - Apollinaire's 'Il Pleut' (1914), Ian Hamilton Finlay's 'Pleut' (1963) or Derek Beaulieu's 'Il Pleut' (2024), a booklet I purchased earlier this month at the latest Small Publisher's Fair. The repetition of one word like this was also used in some notable concrete poems - Pedro Xisto's' 'Rock' (1964), Finlay's 'Star' (1966) - although each of these introduced one further term that gave the poems their meaning. Fulton's text differs from these forms of visual poem in remaining, in Wallace Stevens' phrase, 'the cry of its occasion'. I also think the walk's Japanese location provides the words with a specific resonance. The repetition of 'RAIN' gives a calming, meditative quality, like the regular sound of a water clock in a Zen garden. And the absence of anything but rain recalls the mists and empty spaces of Japanese art.  

*This was in a book to accompany a 1995 show in Munich, Thirty One Horizons. The text was reproduced in Phaidon's big survey of Land and Environmental Art, edited by Jeffrey Kastner, but they unfortunately misprinted the title as Thirty One Horrors, opening up the amusing possibility of an alternative folk horror version of Fulton's walking artist career.

Landscape lunettes in the Grand Master's Palace

Just a brief post this time, which I suspect is of mainly personal interest...

Last week my wife was presenting at a human rights law meeting in Malta, connected with her work on the Istanbul Convention, and I came along for the ride. This photograph was taken in the Grand Master's Palace in Valletta, where I was admiring landscapes painted into lunettes in the walls. A nearby sign said 'the walls, pilasters, arches, the tromp l'oeil soffit and some lunettes were painted by the Italian decorator Nicolò Nasoni in 1723-25.' Nasoni is most famous as an architect in Portugal (he arrived in Oporto circa 1725 in the entourage of Dom Antonio Manuel de Vilhena, who was then Grand Master of the Order) and his work extended to landscape garden design, incorporating his own fountains and statues. However, the landscape painting above is not by Nasoni, it dates from the island's hundred and fifty year period as a British colony. An online article suggests that these new paintings aimed to demonstrate 'the British connection with Malta and also to portray the British rulers as the natural heirs of the glory that was the Order’s reign.' Obviously most of them relate to identifiable Maltese landmarks but research has found that some motifs are English, 'such as an octagonal tower in Tunbridge Wells, and another of a bridge that has since been modified in Bath.' They were painted in 1887 by 'none other than the grandfather of Judge Giovanni Bonello, an artist by the name of Giovanni Bonello, after whom his grandson was named.' Judge Bonello was actually an eminent member of the European Court of Human Rights, described on his retirement as 'a man of broad and deep culture, a connoisseur of great art and a distinguished historian.' 

Fireworks in the Himalayas

I was curious to see the White Cube's Cai Guo-Qiang exhibition but conflicted after the recent controversy surrounding his firework performance in the Himalayas, The Rising Dragon, sponsored by an outdoor clothing company called Arc’teryx. According to Artnet, Cai thought he was bringing "energy, awe, blessings and hope to the world,” but there was a swift backlash over a work 'threatening one of the planet’s most fragile ecosystems and for showing cultural insensitivity, as the Tibetan plateau and its mountains are sacred in Tibetan Buddhism.' It sounds like the worst possible kind of art-in-the-landscape. Two days after the fireworks Cai and Arc'teryx were issuing apologies and explanations. Cai said his fireworks were biodegradable and had passed environmental standards when used for the Beijing Olympics, but scientists 'warned that the damage could be irreversible, given the plateau’s fragile ecosystem' and 'pointed out that standards designed for urban settings do not apply at such high altitudes.' An official investigation was launched. Artnet point out that Cai got into more trouble recently for a drone performance in Quanzhou which 'ended in chaos when drones, unregistered with local authorities, were shot down en masse during the event', and four months earlier an event in Los Angeles caused ash to rain down on spectators and unexpected noise disruption for surrounding neighborhoods. 

Cai Guo-Qiang, Mountain, 2019  

Aware of all this I nevertheless decided to have a look at the gunpowder canvases on display at White Cube, where flower and bird forms emerge from attractive and colourful abstract swirls to create 'cosmic gardens'. The curators wax lyrical: 'amber collides with ash-grey in fevered bursts; diffusions of cerulean are flecked with inky lapis; whirlpools of fuchsia and blue converge and dissolve.' The example above is much less colourful; Mountain (2019) was 'conceived in response to Cézanne yet reframed within a broader horizon that unsettles the paradigm of Eastern and Western art histories, advancing instead a vision of heritage as shared experience.' I'm not sure how far it achieves this, but it's true that it resembles both Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire and the misty contours of a Chinese landscape painting. Cézanne was actually the source for Cai’s controversial fireworks in Tibet, via an early unrealised project for a firework display over Mont Sainte-Victoire, Ascending Dragon: Project for Extraterrestrials No 2 (1989). According to Artnet, 'Cai had originally sought to realize the piece both at Mount Fuji, in Japan, and at Mont Sainte-Victoire in France, but was reportedly denied permission by local authorities due to environmental concerns.'

Le voyage vertical

Tatiana Trouvé, Le voyage vertical, 2022 from the series Les dessouvenirs

The Pinault Collection is currently hosting a major retrospective of art by Tatiana Trouvé at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, which I got to see earlier this month. It includes work from the series Les dessouvenus (2013–ongoing) in which 'the Paris-based artist first douses large sheets of coloured paper into bleach before drawing ‘environmental dramas’ atop the stained surface in pencil. Similarly, The Great Atlas of Disorientation (2019) echoes the surreal bleached effects of the previous series, this time rendered in watercolour, recalling mushroom clouds in one work, or smoke and halos in another' (Frieze). These are dream landscapes which blur the distinction between interior spaces and exterior views, like confused memories. However the trees, forests, mountains and quarries also have an 'ominous atmosphere', to quote the Venice curators, suggesting 'a planet progressively destroyed by human action.'

Tatiana Trouvé, The Border, 2019 from the series The Great Atlas of Disorientation

These are not the only ways in which landscape enters Trouvé's work. She is very influenced by writers who I have talked about on this blog before and has made marble sculptures of their books: Ursula K. Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest, Henry David Thoreau's Walden, Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics. I'll note here three more examples of the ways in which landscapes can be seen in her work.

• 'Walking on streets, forest paths, or by the sea, Tatiana Trouvé picked up objects and had casts made of these relics in bronze, brass, steel, and aluminium, then painted them. Each necklace bears the name of the place of the finding and the time Trouvé was there.' These sculptures derived from walks in the landscape relate to various places in Europe, but I was interested to see one that she made at that epicentre of contemporary post-industrial nature writing, landscape and sound art in Britain: Orford Ness.

• Two plaster casts resembling relief maps in the exhibition space 'originated in impressions that Tatiana Trouvé took on the streets of Montreuil in the aftermath of the riots provoked by the fatal police shooting of a 17-year boy of North African descent in June 2023. The molds made from the rests of the riots-burnt garbage bins, melted plastics and scorched shopfronts-transform into an abstracted landscape that registers the volcanic rage of the disenfranchised and maps the turbulence of the present.'

• Another work can be connected to the city that is hosting this exhibition. Trouvé turned an irregular metal form resulting from an accident in a foundry into 'a sculptural terra incognita, a territory or perhaps a volcanic landscape waiting to be discovered. On a sheet of aluminum card are engraved the feminine names of fifty-five imaginary cities from Italo Calvino's novel Invisible cities.' In Calvino's story 'it transpires that all the places Marco Polo describes are aspects of one city: Venice', and 'just like Calvino, Trouvé explores the porous boundaries of memory and imagination.'

Lovely is the hillside

It could be said that a landscape view provides a crucial turning point in Njál's saga. Gunnar, the reluctant warrior, is drawn into a cycle of violence which leads the Althing assembly to order him to go abroad for three years. Gunnar's friend, the wise Njál, warns him not to break this agreement and Gunnar promises not to. But as Gunnar is about to sail away from Iceland, the site of his farm makes him realise he cannot bear to depart. We know this will lead to his killing, which makes the scene all the more poignant. 

‘They rode towards the Markarfljot river, and then Gunnar's horse slipped, and he sprang from the saddle. He happened to be facing the hillside and the farm at Hlidarendi, and spoke: “Lovely is the hillside - never has it seemed so lovely to me as now, with its pale fields and mown meadows, and I will ride back home and not leave.”’ 

Another way in which the saga relates to landscape is through the places that became known for their association with the story, such as Bergþórshvoll, the farm where Njál himself becomes the victim of an escalating blood feud and is burned alive with his family. I have only been to Iceland once and had no time to visit these places, but was aware as we crossed the Markarfljot river in a minibus on our way to Vik that we had been passing through Njál Country. As I've mentioned before, Fiona MacCarthy’s William Morris biography describes his journey to Iceland where he delighted in encountering connections with the saga. 

'Here was Flosi's Hollow, the place where he and the hundred Burners tethered their horses before firing Njál's house. There was the ditch into which Kári Sölmundarson leapt, to douse himself, after leaping from the building in his blazing clothes. And nearby was the slope where he lay down to recover. They were told by the farmer who guided them around that, only recently, in the excavation of a site for a new parlour, a bed of ashes had been found buried deep in the ground.’

The unknown author of Njál's saga was, as translator Robert Cook says, fascinated by law, and many important 'courtroom' scenes take place at Thingvellir (Þingvellir). Towards the end of the story there is a legal battle (somewhat tedious) followed by an actual battle, shockingly taking place at the Althing, with men fleeing for safety across the Oxara river and hoping to reach shelter in the Almannagja gorge. This gorge is the meeting point of the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates and one of the most spectacular landscapes I have ever seen. After the battle, the two sides are reconciled at the Law Rock, the precise location of which is no longer known, because the geography of the rift valley has not been stable over the course of a thousand years. 

Almannagjá photographed by me in 2019

Grandi paesaggi

Here I am a few days ago, posing for scale so that you can see how big these 18th century landscape paintings are. They are the work of Giuseppe Zais (1709-84) and were made during a great phase of Veneto landscape art, initiated by Marco Ricci and developed further by Francesco Zucarelli. They now hang in the Eremitani Civic Museum in Padua, next to the Cappella degli Scrovegni, with its extraordinary Giotto frescoes. They were actually made for the Alcove Room of the Mussato Palace, a building in the same city that now serves as a middle school. There they would have decorated the walls like tapestries, or a very superior kind of wallpaper. 

Zais painted his hills, trees and rivers in warm colours and golden light. There are just a few rural figures resting and chatting, rather than doing any strenuous work. Such decorative veduta rarely have anything very unusual about them - their purpose was to offer restful escapism. It is hard to find art historical writing about such work, in contrast to the contemporary topographical views of Venice by Canaletto et al, which are endlessly fascinating for their details of daily life and settings that survive largely unchanged. Despite their scale, these Zais landscapes are almost empty of any meaning. They resemble stage scenery and perhaps certain domestic dramas did play out in front of them during the age of Casanova. I can also imagine some member of the Mussato family staff passing them every day and occasionally taking a moment from their duties to daydream about this entrancing world. 

White-Rock Shallows

Pat Suet-Bik Hui, Painting with Poem by Wang Wei, 1995

This is one of the paintings on show in the Ashmolean at the moment, in a small exhibition called The Three Perfections. 

'Hui has inscribed this painting with a Tang-era (618-907) poem that transforms her seemingly abstract streaks of blue into the image of a flowing river: Clear and shallow rapids formed out of white rocks / Green reeds grasp reaching for the sky / Families dotted along both banks / Silk rustling as it's washed beneath the bright moon.'

The curators don't say, but this is one of Wang Wei's poems from the celebrated Wang River Sequence, which I first mentioned here back in 2006. David Hinton calls it 'White-Rock Shallows'. The poems are not purely landscape description - here we see people by the river washing silk. The second slightly confusing line suggests rushes 'grasping' for the sky. Alternative translations include: 'green rushes once could be grasped', 'green reeds almost near enough to touch'  and (Hinton) 'green reeds past prime for harvest.'

Pat Suet-Bik Hui (b. 1943) gave a set these paintings to the Chinese art expert Michael Sullivan, who bequeathed then to the Ashmolean. In addition to paintings with calligraphy, Hui made images without words; one, called 'Landscape', consists of a blue wash for the sky and a green wash for the land, separated by a lavender horizon. Hui has lived for many years in North America but originally studied in Hong Kong under the traditional ink painter Lui Shou Kwan. They were introduced by another of his pupils, Wucius Wong, who specialises in landscapes set within geometric structures (see, for example, the Met's Reminiscing About the River). The Ashmolean has a painting of his called Autumn Feelings which incorporates two leaves and splashes of red and brown ink. There were trees in Oxford this week that are starting to turn and paint the ground with fallen leaves.  

A glorious sunburst-streak

The Wire magazine, which I referenced yesterday, has just put out its 500th issue. I started reading it in 1987 when I was a student, buying my first jazz LPs and looking for information about the history of the music. Over the years, the magazine has broadened its scope and covered a lot of landscape-related sounds. I have often drawn on it in writing Some Landscapes. Perhaps the most influential article for my developing interest in this area was Phil England's survey of Acoustic Ecology in December 2002 - I referred to this excellent article in a 2007 blog post. The Wire archive has become an extraordinary resource and you can spend hours hunting through it for references to landscape - as inspiration for music, or the setting for concerts, or just as a source of metaphors for the way a song or a jazz solo sounds. You can also search for references to actual landscape artists and writers. Robert MacFarlane, for example, has been mentioned eight times so far. Here are almost all the references to Caspar David Friedrich in The Wire's first 500 issues. 

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, c. 1818

Visionary Wanderer: a Disco Inferno song described by Rob Young (April 1994)

Tumbling headlong through beatless space and tunes hung on skyhooks, there's a humming tension which comes to a head in "Footprints In Snow", a glorious sunburst-streak of a song where Crause becomes the visionary Wanderer in a Caspar David Friedrich painting, but transmuted to the end of the 20th century, sapping up whatever moments of beauty he can before it all goes down the tube.

Mountaintop: Günter Schickert characterised in an album review by Brian Morton (March 2019)

Schickert has always had his mountaintop side. He is the Caspar David Friedrich of krautrock, his textures often moonlit, like “Nocturnus” here, or loftily speculative, like the closing “Reflection Of The Future”.

Mind Walks: Wolfgang Voigt's approach described in a review of Gas's Nah Und Fern by Philip Sherburne (June 2008)

Voigt has spoken of taking “mind walks” through the woods, imagining a Gas-like music that he would later recreate in the studio, using contemporary looping techniques to evoke “the continuous rustle of the forest”. In his mythic German imaginary, he provides the musical missing link between Caspar David Friedrich and Gerhard Richter, approaching the subject matter of the former – the landscape, the forest – via the blurred indeterminacy of the latter.

Memory Vague: a Oneohtrix Point Never reworking of Chris De Burgh analysed by Mark Fisher (September 2010)

Oneohtrix Point Never’s “Nobody Here”, collected on the album Memory Vague, has been greeted as a sliver of sublimity. His lift – a slowed down four-bar sample – lacks any parodic designs. Instead, the decontextualised phrase “nobody here” is mined for all its evocative power, calling up the empty Caspar David Friedrich landscapes also suggested by the title of another track from Memory Vague, “Zones Without People”. 

Fluffy Clouds: Lisa Blanning didn't enjoy Hans-Joachim Roedelius at the ICA (July 2006)

Sunday night began with fluffy clouds from Hans-Joachim Roedelius. The German Kluster veteran used a film of mountainscape – a single take of clouds forming and reforming – as the visual accompaniment to his music. There appeared to be aspirations to Caspar David Friedrich-style sublime, but the music was just fluff: inert, insipid, insensate, a dreary series of non-events. Even the occasional jarring moment didn’t lift the music from its fundamental torpor. 

Black Metal: Nico Vascellari in an interview with Anne Hilde Neset (December 2009)

"I completely share the parallel between Black Metal and Caspar David Friedrich," he comments when I suggest the connection. "What [Werner] Herzog said about the jungle [in My Best Fiend, Herzog’s film about Klaus Kinski] is directly connected to my interest in Metal: ‘… Nature is violence based. I would not see anything erotic here. I would see fornication, asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away… The trees here are in misery and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing; I just think they screech in pain.'"

Turbulent: Biba Kopf on a La! Neu! album (March 1999)

Gold Rain relegates Klaus [Dinger] to a supporting drum and producer role behind regular singer Victoria Weyrmeister and pianist Rembrand Lensink who recast Dingerland as a 19th century German drawing room. Inside, a family serenely performs five finger exercises beneath a turbulent Caspar David Friedrich landscape. 

Deep Song: a review of the book Jan Garbarek: Deep Song by Andy Hamilton (March 1999)

Garbarek's amalgam of jazz and World Musics can't be understood outside a wider cultural context. But his response is a massive referential overload, covering influences that are either tenuous or non-existent. We are treated, in order of relevance, to discussions about Norwegian culture, German Romantics - artist Caspar David Friedrich and poet Hölderlin -TS Eliot, Freud, Auschwitz. ... The song may be deep, but surely not that deep.

Hyperreal: Carsten Nicolai interviewed by Rob Young (June 2010) 

“I totally related to the Romantic movement,” he enthuses. “Most of the time the problem is the name itself. It’s not so much about Romance, it’s very scientific. Actually it’s a total construction.” Here, he mentions how the landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich would make sketches of scenes out in the field, but on his finished canvases would recombine separate sketches in a hyperreal, intensified fashion. “Those landscapes don’t exist: they are virtual reality, you could say.” Romanticism, Nicolai believes, is “really important when you are from Germany, because it’s a source. Even if you don’t know you have a relationship [with it], you have a relationship."

Techno fetishists: second-rate Friedrichs in a review of the Atonal festival by Derek Walmsley (October 2015)

A solo set from Alessandro Cortini is so gothic and brooding that it turns insular, and although Lustmord has some of the most beautiful visuals of the weekend, his evocations of dread and probing of psychological pressure points are so subjective they fall flat with many. The droners and techno fetishists at Atonal come across like doomed Romantics. You wonder if, with time, the greyscale portentousness of these and similar performances (typically the ones where artists seem most wedded to their laptops) will be looked back on with the same bemusement as so many forgotten 19th century German Romantic landscape painters – second-rate Caspar David Friedrichs of the dull sublime.

 Communicational Sublime: Mark Fisher on Kraftwerk (October 2009)

Kraftwerk sensed here a new version of the sublime, which they adapted into a European context. Theirs was a communicational sublime which replaced the Caspar David Friedrich mountain panoramas of the classical sublime with the neon vistas of midnight cities and the intricacies of circuitry. Communication, in the sense that geographers use it – comprising not only telephones, computers, photographs and stock exchanges, but also roads and trains – is Kraftwerk’s great theme.

Sounds of Waste: a Jacob Kirkegaard exhibition reviewed by George Grella (May 2021)

If there’s dread in hearing the environment swamped by the wastefulness of consumer capitalism, it’s that of the sublime. Kirkegaard thinks that any listener could find something beautiful in the sounds of waste that he’s assembled, and TESTIMONIUM exerts the same fascination as a Caspar David Friedrich painting. There may be something dreadful out there, but that just makes one want to touch it even more.