Brightening fields of ether fair-disclos'd

James Thomson in 1726 by John Vanderbank

'From brightening fields of ether fair-disclos'd, /Child of the sun, refulgent Summer comes...' Hot sunny weather today beings to mind these opening lines of James Thomson's poem 'Summer' (1730).  In his enjoyable survey Lives of the Poets (1998), Michael Schmidt devotes a whole chapter to Thomson, but calls it 'Dead Pastoral'. Here are some of his arguments against Thomson:

• He is now 'primarily read by scholars who prefer dust to living dirt'
• His verse was once as ubiquitous in inns and cottages as Gideon bibles and was similarly 'reassuring and instructive but never taxing'
• He was fashionably up-to-date on philosophy and science, but this modernity now dates him
• His language is derived from Milton - he 'vulgarized Milton as he vulgarized the new science'
• There is verbal exuberance but 'it is hard at times to see through the adjectival undergrowth to a subject'
• He forfeits our attention by ascending to generalization. Gilbert White's prose conveys far more because he addresses a subject whereas Thomson addresses an audience
• Although there are good lines there is 'want of method', in Dr Johnson's judgement
• Nevertheless, Johnson admired Thomson, a misjudgment Schmidt puts down to his enthusiasm for the novelty of Thomson's subject matter
• And yet Thomson's approach wasn't that new -he revived the georgic, but others had already done this
• Thomson's countryside is recognisable rather than mythic, but it is still an optimistic, idealised view that celebrates commerce an enterprise - The Seasons is a Whig epic
• The best thing he occasioned was William Collins' Ode on Thomson's death

Pretty damning. Of course Schmidt does credit Thomson with a few good moments, like these delicious lines from 'Summer':

'Bear me, Pomona! to thy citron groves;
To where the lemon and the piercing lime,
With the deep orange glowing through the green,
Their lighter glories blend. Lay me reclined
Beneath the spreading tamarind, that shakes,
Fanned by the breeze, its fever-cooling fruit.'

Schmidt argues that Thomson can only really be enjoyed in odd lines. 'He lacks Wordsworth's engagement. His is an enthusiasm of the various senses, but the whole man is withheld. Wordsworth's imagination is continuous with the experienced world, Thomson's tangential to it.' But Thomson has always been dipped into for the poetic fragments, like the quotations that artists like Turner appended to their paintings. Turner went so far as to paint a tribute to the poet, Thomson's Aeolian Harp (1809), showing an ideal memorial to the poet in which a harp placed on his tomb could respond to the cycle of the seasons. Turner wrote lines to accompany the painting: '... Let Summer shed her many blossoms fair, / to shield the trembling strings in noon-tide ray; / While ever and anon the dulcet air / shall rapturous thrill, or sigh in sweets away...'

The James Thomson memorial in Richmond

Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef

Strange underwater landscapes are currently on display at the South Bank - the Institute for Figuring have brought their hyperbolic crochet coral reef project to England:

'The IFF reef has been inspired by the principles of hyperbolic crochet originally developed by mathematician Dr Daina Taimina. In 1997 Dr Taimina discovered how to make models of the geometry known as hyperbolic space using the feminine art of crochet. Until that time most mathematicians had believed it was impossible to construct physical models of hyperbolic forms, yet nature had been doing just that for hundreds of millions of years. It turns out that many marine organisms embody hyperbolic geometry, among them kelps, corals, sponges and nudibranchs. The IFF reef not only looks like an actual coral reef, it draws on the same underlying geometry endemic in the oceanic realm... Over the past two years, through increasingly freeform experimentation, we have discovered that tiny changes in the underlying crochet algorithms will result in major changes to the resulting forms. By exploiting this insight we have gradually evolved a wide taxonomy of hyperbolic crochet “species.” To our surprise, the range of possible forms seems to be endless, yet they all result from extremely simple instruction sets. Just as the teeming variety of living species on earth result from different versions of the DNA-based genetic code, so too a huge range of crochet hyperbolic species have been brought into being through minor modifications to the underlying code. As time progresses the models have “evolved” from the simple purity of Dr Taimina’s mathematically precise algorithms to more complex aberrations that invoke ever more naturalistic forms.'

The London reef exhibition is in two parts. The Hayward Gallery shows some of the earlier works from this project: 'the Bleached Reef, a new configuration of the Ladies Silurian Reef, the beautifully archaic Branched Anemone Garden, and the ever-growing Toxic Reef... the wondrously surreal Chicago Cambrian Reef (curated by IFF contributor Aviva Alter), plus a new formation of the Beaded Reef by master beaders Rebecca Peapples and Sue Von Ohlsen, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable Reef (with hot-pink sand by Kathleen Greco), and the Bottle Tree Grove (featuring works by Christine Wertheim, Evelyn Hardin and Nadia Severns)'. The Royal Festival Hall has a display of reefs made by UK crafters (see photograph above). Mrs Plinius, who is a dab hand with the needles, was one of the contributors.

Severn's ambient wave

The Book of English Rivers by Samuel Lewis (1855) contains brief descriptions of all the main rivers, noting down points of topographical interest: notable views, snippets of local history and literary associations. There are no extended passages of description, but the flow of place names as he tracks the course of each river has its own kind of poetry. There follows a kind of précis of Lewis’s entry for the river Severn which gives an indication of the landscapes along the river he found particularly interesting.

Lewis traces the course of the Severn from its source, past the village of Llandinam, the Roman station of Caer-Sws and Newtown from where it is possible to see Montgomery Castle, birthplace of George Herbert. (Herbert wrote religious poetry but you can imagine him looking at the river when he wrote in ‘The Storm’: ‘If as the windes and waters here below / Do flie and flow, / My sighs and tears as busy were above; Sure they would move / And much affect thee..’ )

From there, Lewis continues, the river passes Powis Castle and becomes navigable at Welshpool, flows by Llandrinio and the Breiddin Hills and then leaves Wales for the plain of Salop. He notes the striking landscape at Loton mansion, White Abbey and then describes the course of ‘Severn’s ambient wave’ through Shrewsbury. This memorable phrase comes from a poem by William Shenstone: ‘Admired Salopia! that with venial pride / Eyes her bright form in Severn's ambient wave, / Famed for her loyal cares in perils try'd, / Her daughters lovely, and her striplings brave.’

Near Shrewsbury is Meole Brook, a trout stream where the fisherman who taught Izaak Walton fly-fishing, Thomas Barker, grew up. Memorable buildings follow: Haughmond Abbey, Attingham Hall (designed by Athenian Stuart), the Roman remains at Wroxeter, Cound Hall, Leighton Hall and Buildwas Abbey. The industrial landscape of Coalbrook Dale comes next, followed by Apley with notable views to be had from the drive of Apley Terrace. Still in Shropshire, the Severn flows through Bridgenorth and past Quatford church on an eminence above the river. To Dudmaston woods, Alveley, Higley and then the river enters a small part of Staffordshire.

Flowing on into Worcestershire, at Stourport it receives the Stour. Lewis mentions Thorngrove villa, the seat of Lucien Bonaparte during his stay in England, and Hallow where the scientist Sir Charles Bell is buried. At Worcester there are picturesque views of the Malvern hills and more noteworthy views further downriver at Severn-Stoke church. Upton is ‘described in poetry by Mr Cottle “- Many stately trees, and many cots, / And villages, o’erspread the country round…’’'

The rocky scenery of Mythe is the next notable landscape feature on the river’s course. Then, after Tewkesbury, the Severn divides temporarily in two and forms the Isle of Alney, with Gloucester on the eastern channel. Having received another river, the Froome, it makes a horse-shoe bend with great views from Newnham to Cotswolds and Forest of Dean. Finally, Lewis brings his description to the estuary: Sharpness Point, Lydney, and the meeting place of the lower Avon, flowing from Bristol.

The Severn seen from Gloucestershire, 2008

The sea at Aldeburgh

Caspar David Friedrich, Bohemian Landscape, c. 1810

Back in June 1991 composer David Matthews gave the first Peter Fuller memorial lecture, discussing the link between music and art, with a strong emphasis on landscape. For example, Friedrich's paintings of distant mountains find their 'exact musical equivalent' in Bruckner's 8th Symphony, with its 'regligious apprehension of nature'. The 'Royal Hunt and storm' from Berlioz's opera The Trojans (1863) is similar in spirit to Claude's last painting, Landscape with Ascanius shooting the Stag of Sylvia (1682). And Wagner and Turner share a mastery of colour.

The talk was reported on by Boris Ford in the Autumn 1991 edition of Modern Painters. He quotes a section on 'Dawn', one of the Sea Interludes in Peter Grimes, which was compared to a Philip Wilson Steer seascape, Sunrise on the Sea, Walberswick (1889):

'... a high, unaccompanied, melodic line for violins and flutes. This is clearly the sky. If the violins had played the line by themselves, the purity of their tone might have suggested an unclouded blue, but the stage directions indicate 'a cold grey morning', and with the dulling of the violins' bright overtones by the flute doubling, we sense one of those high, wide, leaden skies so typical of the East coast: this is the sea at Aldeburgh... so Britten brings us in, through the clarinet and viola arpeggios, outlined by harp, which are perhaps the breaking of waves on the shore, to the great expanse of the sea itself: soft brass chords expressive of the sea's power and of its latent menace, which will explode later in the opera in a violent storm.'

In 1995 a new score of the Sea Interludes was discovered which had been closely annotated by the composer (and might therefore be seen as related tengentially to the 'annotated landscape' art discussed in my previous posting here). According to the BBC proms site 'it is not known when or why Britten marked up this copy of the score - was it perhaps to help him draft a programme note? - though the precise, albeit prosaic, nature of the annotations suggests that specific events in the music were related to specific visual images in the composer's mind. Thus, against passages in 'Dawn', we can read 'land (or sea scape)', 'slow wave', 'gulls' and 'a big wave', and in 'Storm', 'Seascape (whole sea)', 'waves', 'wind', 'spray blowing' and (rather more revealingly) 'still centre (Grimes' ecstasy)'.

Petra, 13 April 1858

In his essay 'Painters as Writers' Stephen Spender wrote:

'The meeting place of words and painting is those drawings in which painters have scribbled the names of colours as an aide-mémoire. The word "grey" written against olive trees by van Gogh or Cotman obviously means something different to the artist from that which it suggests to the reader. When one looks at a sketch and sees a written word, there is the suggestion of a leap from the word to the miracle of the paint, and this is itself an effect of poetry, which Apollinaire tried to exploit when he arranged the words of a poem in the form of sketches. Moreover, the painters who write most on their sketches themselves seem to be extremely open to the suggestion of words, an extreme example being the painter and humorous poet Edward Lear, who did many such sketches.'

The Edward Lear example below was the best I could find with a quick search - other sketches of his have a lot more words on them. I'm tempted to suggest that Lear's paintings in this vein belong to a rarely noticed subgenre of 'annotated landscapes', along with photographs like Roni Horn's Still Water, Chinese landscape paintings like Mount Pan, and even, at a stretch, geographical illustrations like those of Geoffrey Hutchings.

Edward Lear, Petra 13 April 1858

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Finished Housing, Lakewood, California

The Plow that Broke the Plains (see previous posting) is discussed in an essay by Denis Cosgrove, included in my friend Kathryn’s interdisciplinary archive BIPOLAR. Lorentz’s images of the Dustbowl are one of the examples picked by Cosgrove to consider five key moments in 20^th century environmentalism. He also talks about photographs of atomic bomb tests in the fifties and the first images seen of the Earth from space. The other two examples are linked:

• Environmental concern in the early twentieth century was focused on nature protection, as in John Muir’s campaign for the creation of Yosemite National Park, the singular ‘natural’ beauty of which had been established in the previous century through Albert Bierstadt’s paintings and photographs by Eadweard Muybridge and Carleton Watkins. Subsequently, the panoramic shots of Yosemite taken by Muir’s acolyte Ansel Adams would feature in a series of Sierra Club coffee table books. Their portrayal of a timeless wilderness untouched by human agency only started to be criticised by a new generation of environmentalists in the late sixties.
  

• Mass suburbanisation after the War brought new fears of urban sprawl and, again, images were crucial in dramatising the issue. Cosgrove highlights William Garnett’s aerial photographs of new suburban homes, like Finished Housing, Lakewood, California, which were originally shot to celebrate the use of industrial building techniques in a period of high housing demand. However, re-titled and juxtaposed with Ansel Adams photographs in the Sierra Club’s This is the American Earth (1960), they were used to symbolise both the destruction of the wilderness and the restriction of freedom in an age of uniform mass housing.

Cosgrove ends his essay by discussing the way images of threatened polar bears are being used to give fears of global warming a sense of urgency. ‘The focus is on natural life, with topography and landscape reduced to a backdrop, no longer a space of deep time and infinitely slow evolution, but of accelerating change and catastrophic extinction.’

High winds and sun . . .

High winds and sun . . .
High winds and sun...
a country without rivers and with little rain.
Settler, plow at your peril!

Last week I watched the new Naxos DVD of The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936), the Dust Bowl documentary described by its director, Pare Lorentz, as a ‘melodrama of nature’. The film is partly renowned for Virgil Thomson’s score, divided into six movements: Prelude, Pastorale (Grass), Cattle, Blues (Speculation), Drought, and Devastation. There is an excellent Pare Lorentz site with the full Whitmanesque script and an extract from the film. For me the most striking section of the film comes when the plains are transformed into a grey sea of dust and the sound of a pump organ is heard on the score playing what the notes to the DVD describe as a ‘bare, neo-medieval two part counterpoint.’ It is very affecting.

From a landscape perspective the next film Lorentz and Thomson made, The River, is even more interesting. The script was praised by James Joyce as "the most beautiful prose that I have heard in ten years", and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1938. It describes the Mississippi in its Eden-like state before the coming of industry, agriculture, ‘a hundred cities and a thousand towns’. It laments the poverty and destruction caused by poor land and floods, but holds out the hope of redemption through New Deal projects like the dams of the Tennessee River Authority. There are some beautiful images, although some of the most striking, like a moving river of logs, were apparently taken from footage made for other films.

The Lorentz site also has a page on The City, a film sponsored by The American Institute of Planners for the 1939 World's Fair. This was made by Willard Van Dyke and Ralph Steiner, who had worked on the earlier films. Lorentz wrote the script, Lewis Mumford narrated it, and the music this time was by Aaron Copland.

The Moon Appearing and the Breeze Arriving

I have been reading rather enviously Gardenhistorygirl's recent posts about the gardens of Suzhou. The nearest I've got to seeing any of these is the Metropolitan Museum's Astor Court in New York - this was was modeled on the Late Spring Studio at Wang Shi Yuan, a Suzhou garden with particularly evocative names (e.g. The Pavilion of the Moon Appearing and the Breeze Arriving). If I ever get to Suzhou I'd love to see the rockery at Shi Zi Lin, the artificial hill at Cang Lang Ting, the cliff walk at Ou Yuan and the collection of miniature landscapes at Lin Yuan. I can imagine sipping tea in the Hall of Distant Fragrance in Zhuo Zheng Yuan, gazing out onto the water garden... I'm sure the reality is less poetic.

The Oxford Companion to Gardens describes Suzhou as ideally situated: plentiful water, pleasant hills, good climate and a local supply of finest garden stones. These stones came from an island in Lake Tai (Taihu). 'They are grey limestone boulders excavated from the water where waves, hammering against small, harder stones embedded in the rock, have eroded them into peculiar shapes and textures. Those that are wrinkled, emaciated, and full of jagged holes are considered the best and, in the Song dynasty, were some of the most expensive objects in the empire. Although, originally, Taihu stones lost value if improved by human hands, a local industry developed which encouraged the natural weathering process by placing in the lake suitable specimens of limestone for later harvesting. Books on rock collecting, like Du Wuan's Yun Lin Shi Bu (Stone Catalogue of Cloudy Forest) written c. 1125, constantly warned connoisseurs to beware of fakes.'

A crater formed by a one-ton bomb, or an acre of bluebonnets

Visiting somewhere like Orsanmichele in Florence, we are grateful for the opportunity to see the combined talents of artists like Donatello, Nanni de Banco and Ghiberti, who were each commissioned to provide sculptures for the site. Land art nearly had a special place of this kind: the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. If things had gone differently in 1966-7, the airport could now have had pioneering Earthworks by Robert Smithson, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt and Robert Morris. Here’s how Robert Smithson described the project at the time:

‘The object of this proposal is to “program” the landscape and define the limits of the air terminal site in a new way. Such a project would set a precedent and create an original approach to the esthetics of airport landscaping. All these works will be close to ground level (the highest being 3 feet). Robert Smithson and Robert Morris will build forms that will be visible to aircraft as they take off and land. Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre will provide works that will deal with the “sub-site,” and exist as underground landmarks.’

The story of the airport project is told in Suzaan Boettger’s book Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties. Walther Prokosch, an architect with the Manhattan firm T.A.M.S., had heard Smithson give a talk in June 1966, in which he described the city as a “crystalline network”, an idea similar to the modular design being developed for the airport by T.A.M.S. Smithson was taken on as a consultant and began thinking about the kind of sculpture necessary for an airport. First there could be ‘aerial art’ – large, flat, low lying works placed between the runways and building and visible from the air. Second, there were works inside the terminal but linked to the sites outside – these interior works were ‘non-sites’. Smithson’s proposals include Aerial Map – Proposal for Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport (1967), an obvious pre-cursor to Spiral Jetty. In June 1967 he published ‘Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site’ in Artforum, but that same month funding for Smithson via T.A.M.S. from the airport board ceased and the project never came to fruition.

For his contribution, Robert Morris created a Model and Cross-Section for Project in Earth and Sod (1966). It is a neat, minimal elevated disk, depicting an outdoor sculpture which clearly pre-figures later Earthworks, although not the work pursued in the late sixties by Morris himself, like the pile of soil and industrial detritus made for the EARTH WORKS show two years later.

Carl Andre’s proposal was a crater 12 inches deep and 144 inches in diameter, created by an explosive charge ‘detonated by the sculptor, Carl Andre.’ Smithson published the proposal (with echoes of Vietnam and flower power) as: ‘A crater formed by a one-ton bomb dropped from 10,000 feet, or, An acre of bluebonnets (state flower of Texas)’.

Sol LeWitt proposed to Smithson a kind of anti-monument: ‘encase a six-inch wooden cube containing something in an eighteen inch cement cube and bury it someplace on The Tract. The precise spot would not be designated...’ There is some irony to this given the monumental scale of later Earthworks and the increasing importance of land art sites for cultural tourism. The airport lost its chance to host this early work by Sol LeWitt, but it naturally now has a public art programme, including a piece by LeWitt.

The Forest of Fontainebleau

Here's a movie quote you'll remember...

"Well, all right, why is life worth living? That's a very good question. Well, there are certain things I guess that make it worthwhile. Uh, like what? Okay. Um, for me... oh, I would say... what, Groucho Marx, to name one thing... and Willie Mays, and... the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony, and... Louis Armstrong's recording of 'Potatohead Blues'... Swedish movies, naturally... 'Sentimental Education' by Flaubert... Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra... those incredible apples and pears by Cézanne... the crabs at Sam Wo's... Tracy's face..."

Among many reasons why Woody Allen might consider L'Éducation sentimentale one of the things that make life worthwhile are Flaubert's beautiful, precise descriptions of people, things and places. Douglas Parmée has listed some of the landscapes Flaubert includes: Nogent (dull and domesticated), Auteuil (pretty but with a touch of autumn melancholy) and various views of The Seine, which 'flows through throughout the novel, sometimes beautiful but indifferent, sometimes charmingly delicate.' However, the most striking example in the book is the extended sequence describing a brief time of happiness for Frédéric and Rosanette in the Forest of Fontainebleau. According to Parmée it 'has all the immediacy of notes taken on the spot: solemnity and exhilaration, painterly chiaroscuro with cinematic long shots and close-ups, lurking danger (monstrous rocks, smells of decay, leafless branches in midsummer), the delicacy of gossamer and butterflies, glittering water and greenery of every shade, sun and sudden showers, hills and valleys, low bushes and towering trees...' This extract from the French text describes the effect of light on the forest trees:

'La lumière, à de certaines places éclairant la lisière du bois, laissait les fonds dans l'ombre ; ou bien, atténuée sur les premiers plans par une sorte de crépuscule, elle étalait dans les lointains des vapeurs violettes, une clarté blanche. Au milieu du jour, le soleil, tombant d'aplomb sur les larges verdures, les éclaboussait, suspendait des gouttes argentines à la pointe des branches, rayait le gazon de traînées d'émeraudes, jetait des taches d'or sur les couches de feuilles mortes ; en se renversant la tête, on apercevait le ciel, entre les cimes des arbres. Quelques-uns, d'une altitude démesurée, avaient des airs de patriarches et d'empereurs, ou, se touchant par le bout, formaient avec leurs longs fûts comme des arcs de triomphe ; d'autres, poussés dès le bas obliquement, semblaient des colonnes près de tomber.

Cette foule de grosses lignes verticales s'entrouvrait. Alors, d'énormes flots verts se déroulaient en bosselages inégaux jusqu'à la surface des vallées où s'avançait la croupe d'autres collines dominant des plaines blondes, qui finissaient par se perdre dans une pâleur indécise.'

And here's a depiction of the forest trees by one of Woody Allen's favourite artists...

Paul Cézanne, The Forest of Fountainebleau, 1879-82

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Whiling Away the Summer

This is a detail from Whiling Away the Summer (1679) a handscroll by Wu Li (1632-1718). What an enticing image of scholarly retreat! As the Met's curators say, 'there is a dreamlike quality about the painting: birds, trees, bamboo, mist, and even rocks dance joyously around the hermit-scholar, who sits quietly reading in his idyllic domain.' Wu Li wrote that he had painted this landscape 'one clear morning after a rainfall, sitting alone in his studio thinking of an absent friend'.

This work is labelled 'Landscape as Self-Portrait' in the Met's exhibition How to Read Chinese Paintings. Some other highlights:

• Scholar Viewing a Waterfall by Ma Yuan (act. ca. 1190–1225) where the "one corner" composition contrasts the solidity of rocks and trees, to the misty emptiness beyond the falls. It is similar to Watching the Deer by a Pine-Shaded Stream, which I referred to in an earlier post.

• Twin Pines, Level Distance by the artist-calligrapher Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322), a landscape which one might describe as having been written... Zhao advocated different writing styles for different landscape elements - unmodulated seal script for trees, 'flying white' cursive script for rocks.

• Poet Strolling by a Marshy Bank by Liang Kai (act. 1st half C13) in which the inaccessibility of the distant landscape is emphasised by a massive overhanging cliff, partially obstructing the poet's view.

• Old Trees, Level Distance by Guo Xi (c 1000-90), a misty 'landscape of emotion' according to the Met, who quote from the impressively titled treatise Guo Xi wrote, Linquan gaozhi (Lofty Ambitions in Forests and Streams): 'after the outlines are made clear by dark ink strokes, use ink wash mixed with blue to retrace these outlines repeatedly so that, even if the ink outlines are clear, they appear always as if they had just come out of the mist and dew.'

Paterson

Here's an extract from the interview Robert Smithson gave to Paul Cummings in 1972:

"CUMMINGS: Would you like to say something about your visit with William Carlos Williams?
SMITHSON: Yes. Well, this took place I think in either 1958 or 1959. William Carlos Williams was going to do an Introduction for Irving Layton's book of poems. So I went out to Rutherford with Irving Layton... He talked a lot about Allen Ginsberg coming out at all hours of the night, and having to spring poets out there. Allen Ginsberg comes from Paterson, New Jersey. I guess the Paterson area is where I had a lot of my contact with quarries and I think that is somewhat embedded in my psyche. As a kid I used to go and prowl around all those quarries. And of course, they figured strongly in Paterson. When I read the poems I was interested in that, especially this one part of Paterson where it showed all the strata levels under Paterson. Sort of proto-conceptual art, you might say. Later on I wrote an article for Artforum on Passaic which is a city on the Passaic River south of Paterson. In a way I think it reflects that whole area. Williams did have a sense of that kind of New Jersey landscape."

The strata levels section Smithson is referring to comes towards the end of Paterson Book Three (1949). Williams included an extract from William Nelson's History of the City of Paterson which lists the materials found at various depths when an artesian well was bored at the Passaic Rolling Mill, Paterson. At an initial depth of 65 feet there was "Red sandstone, fine". Then we encounter mostly shale and sandstone at other depths until we reach 2,100 feet down: "Shaly sandstone". The most interesting part of this vertical, one-dimensional landscape seems to occur around 1,170-1,370 feet, with some selenite, pyrites and quicksand. Williams also quoted the conclusion that beyond 2,100 feet there was no point in further digging as water would be unfit for use. This text is juxtaposed in Paterson with extracts from a letter by Ezra Pound exhorting Williams to do more reading, e.g. Golding's Ovid and "all the Gk tragedies" (Pound's canon of good writing as literary historical strata to dig down into...)

Paterson covers many subjects - art, poetry, love, religion, economics... However it starts in the New Jersey landscape: an image of the city lying like a man with his head near the Paterson Falls. Williams quotes his dictum, no ideas but in things, and then describes the view: 'From above, higher than the spires, higher / even than the office towers, from the oozy fields / abandoned to grey beds of dead grass, / black sumac, withered weed-stalks, / mud and thickets cluttered with dead leaves - / the river comes pouring in above the city / and crashes from the edge of the gorge / in a recoil of spray and rainbow mists...' You can hear Williams read these lines here.

In another 1972 interview, with Gianni Pettena, Robert Smithson said "I like landscapes that suggest prehistory. As an artist it is sort of interesting to take on the persona of a geologic agent where man actually becomes part of that process rather than overcoming it - rather than overcoming the natural processes of challenging the situation. you just go along with it, and there can be a kind of building that takes place this way. I did an article once, on Passaic, New jersey, a kind of rotting industrial town where they were building a highway along the river. It was somewhat devastated. In a way, this article I wrote on Passaic could be conceived as a kind of appendix to William Carlos Williams' poem Paterson. It comes out of that kind of New Jersey ambience where everything is chewed up. New Jersey like a kind of destroyed California, a derelict California."

Toward Albuquerque

While I was in Chelsea (see last post) I popped into the new Chelsea Art Museum. I was practically the only person there - you have to pay to get in whereas all the other galleries are free... I was drawn by the rather ostentatiously titled exhibition Oh ChiGyun: Defining Landscape.

These days landscape painters often seem to need some means of justifying the pursuit of what may seem an exhausted art form. I've remarked here before, how a novel technique may be one way through this problem, and in Oh Chigyun's case the most distinctive element is his method of applying paint by hand. As the CAM site says: 'Some of the things that distinguish Oh ChiGyun's approach to painting are his strong yet sensitive palette, pictures that are highly textured from pigment being amply applied to their surfaces, and his use of other support material other than canvas including found and discarded doors and windows. But the most unique aspect of Oh ChiGyun's art is his technique in which he applies paint to his pictures directly with his hands rather than by brush. Oh ChiGyun's idiosyncratic métier creates an immediacy and intimacy between imagination, subject matter, and artistic execution.'

In addition to his methods, there is the artist's cross-cultural background, coming from South Korea and painting American landscapes. Does this give his paintings a unique flavour, or is this just background information in comparison to the artist's personal vision? A brief essay on the Oh Chigyuan (오치균) website certainly suggests that his art is a fusion of Asian and Western influences. I find his paintings of small details of the urban scene like doorways or rail tracks more impressive than his cityscapes. However, his light effects can be quite startling and simple views of the highway, like Toward Albuquerque (2004), stay in the memory.

A lake at Essen

I had to go to New York last week and once work was over I took myself over to Chelsea to look round the galleries. Matthew Marks has a Katharina Fritsch exhibition (it finishes tomorrow) in which her sculptures are displayed against silkscreen landscapes. For example, there are images of a lake at Essen and rocks in Franken. The White Cube had a similar exhibition in 2006 in which 'Fritsch created a site-specific installation, transforming the exhibition space into a municipal park, or at least the memory of a park that she frequented as a child in the town of Essen. To create these mental landscapes Fritsch created works from postcards sent to her by her grandfather in the 1970s and 80s. These romanticized scenes are set within the industrial landscape of the Ruhr district, referred to by the artist as her 'heimat' or homeland. Transferred onto large, individually silk-screened panels, the single-colour matt painted surface is the result of a meticulous and extremely precise handcrafted printing process that appears deceptively simple. Each panel depicts the scene in a single colour, as if the other colours in the spectrum have faded, over time, by the bleaching of the sun to leave a trace, or a melancholic memory as if viewing the picturesque scene at twilight.'

Landscapes in old postcards inevitably have a sense of poignancy and ghostly nostalgia but there's no reason to suppose contemporary artists can't avoid cliche and make use of them in various interesting ways. Tacita Dean, for example, has pursued a similar approach in works like Crowhurst (2006) - see below (photography is allowed at MOMA!) The MOMA site says that 'a series in which Dean painted out the backgrounds of old postcards depicting trees led her to her own photographs of famous or ancient trees in her native England.' Jonathan Jones has described one of these trees as appearing to 'bulge out of its setting and press forward into the empty air of the gallery, as if the rotten, grey hulk of a graveyard tree she has found in a postcard were reaching towards you on the sticks that prop it up, tapping you on the shoulder, telling its tale. Dean has brushed white gouache, an opaque watercolour, over huge areas of an enlarged black and white photograph to create this bizarre effect. The tree, isolated, stands proud - a solitary survivor, an aged outcast, a watcher over the dead. In terms of its emotional and intellectual impact, this a truly monumental work, and yet this is just a piece of paper pinned to the wall.'

Tacita Dean, Crowhurst, 2006

photographed at MOMA, New York

A Sound Map of the Danube

Annea Lockwood's A Sound Map of the Danube has just been released. The New Music Box has an excellent interview conducted with Lockwood in 2004 in which she describes working on this project. One of the main problems was actually recording sounds that convey a riverscape when the Danube flows through cities that 

"pave its banks with stone and rock. All of them run roads right along the bank [laughs] I haven't recorded the Danube in any of them. I haven't recorded the Danube specifically in Vienna. I went up in the Vienna woods and recorded a tributary. I haven't recorded it in Budapest. I went south of Budapest to an island and found a great recording about a half an hour south of Budapest. Where else have I not recorded the Danube? [laughs] I didn't record it in Belgrade. I wanted to very much. So I went to where the Sava River flows into the Danube thinking, perfect spot, major tributary, major confluence, and there wasn't a peep. Not even a little wave action. I'm recording in tiny little spots, really out of the way places, and finding really wonderful sounds."

In her notes to the album she describes how the landscape 'composes itself': 

"I recorded from the banks, finding a great variety of water sounds as the gradient and bank materials changed, often feeling that I was hearing the process of geological change in real time. Towards the end of the final field trip, while listening to small waves slap into a rounded overhang the river had carved in a mud bank in Rasova, Romania (CD 3 track 2), I realised that the river has agency; it composes itself, shaping its sounds by the way it sculpts its banks."

Lockwood's Sound Map of the the Danube was preceded by her Sound Map of the Hudson River, a brief watery extract of which can be heard here. However, she began recording rivers in the sixties: 

"I started recording rivers back in the '60s, again when I was in England, because I was interested in trying to discover why they are so magnetic to us, why people love to go to river banks, what their ears are reaching for as well as their eyes, and what our bodies respond to in rivers. At the same time I was aware that for city people—many of the world's major cities are on rivers, right—for city people, rivers are usually entirely visual. They're not sonic entities. They're not sound worlds. I wanted to bring a river into the body in a different way than through the eyes."

Postscript April 2021

 This is a screen grab from a short film, 'Annea Lockwood / A Film About Listening' which I watched this week on the Counterflows website. In the thirteen years since I wrote this post Lockwood has made further landscape-related recordings, including A Sound Map of the Housatonic River.

Manufactured landscapes

It's a very long way from the subject of my last posting to the industrial landscapes of modern China, explored in Jennifer Baichwal's film Edward Burtynsky: Manufactured Landscapes. Then again, Burtynsky's photographs are still a Western take on China - the exotic Rococo dream replaced by a nightmare of environmental apocalypse...

I tend to agree with Mark Sinker's verdict: "visually, the film is rich and subtle - Burtynsky finds an eerie beauty in the starkest, most poisoned, emptied vistas; what's deathly here is also potent and haunting. The words and music are less successful - the former somewhat diffident and unspecific, perhaps tactically, the latter rather off-the-peg, an Eno-esque soundtrack to an arch suspension of judgement. And the problem of the cliché of the Chinese as a teeming, purposeful yet inscrutable ocean of humanity is perhaps not quite pushed back against as much as it might be."

Sinker may be hinting here that the 'diffident and unspecific' commentary was necessary to get agreement to shoot the film. I suppose I was expecting something more creative, like the poetic science fiction of Herzog's Lessons of Darkness. The relative banality of the narrative in Manufactured Landscape does allow you to focus on the visual imagery, but it left me pondering (no doubt unfairly) whether the photographer and film maker had sufficiently reflected on what they were filming. Sinker provides an example in highlighting the Ballardian landscape of the Chittagong shipbreaking beach in Bangladesh, "where huge rusting tankers sit stranded on otherwise naked mudflats, scavenged and dismantled by local teenagers. We're told almost nothing about this set-up - except that it's very poorly paid and very dangerous - but Burtynsky perhaps judges the force of the image more effective than any lecture about economics or sociology."

How far would the emotions felt two hundred years ago in front of a painting like Coalbrookdale by Night have differed from those experienced by a modern viewer of Manufactured Landscapes. There is the same frightening power to alter landscapes and replace natural with manufacturing forces, and the same human and environmental costs (which were, of course, evident to poets like Blake and Wordsworth). But the sense of scale is far greater in this film - there is something of Kant's mathematical sublime in Burtynsky's photograph of seemingly endless mountains of coal, or in Baichwal's long opening shot of a vast factory floor. The enormity of the Three Gorges Dam, where Burtynsky photographed a city about to be drowned, is difficult to grasp. This awesome construction seems to have been unscathed by the recent Sichuan earthquake, in which terrifying natural forces have created new lakes through landslides, as well as weakening dams built by the Chinese (including one that is over 2000 years old).

Fishermen in a gorge

Chinoiserie's motifs include chrysanthemums, dragons, pearls, pagodas, Chinese warriors, pigtailed boys and mustachioed monks. Looking round the exhibition 'Chinese Whispers: Chinoiserie in Britain 1650-1930' today, it was clear that in general, landscapes tend to feature as the settings for figures - drinking tea, fishing or walking under parasols. Nevertheless, Stella Beddoe notes in the catalogue that by 1800 the more picturesque figurative subjects illustrating Old Cathay had almost disappeared from mass-produced china in favour of more simple views of gardens, land and waterscapes. The most famous design of all, dating from 1790, features two lovers fleeing a stern father through a landscape that includes a weeping willow and pagoda. It is still ubiquitous - only last week I was eating cake from a willow pattern plate at my mother-in-law's. My grandparents had rows of them all around their dining room.

The catalogue to the exhibition is described here as 'useless', which is harsh, but I would like it to have had a bit more detail in places. For example, it would be good to learn more of William Alexander's drawings, made in Peking in 1793 whilst he was part of the unsuccessful mission to China (the emperor said to the British ambassador "we have never valued ingenious articles, neither do we have the slightest need of your country's manufactures.") The British Library has Alexander's images in their on-line gallery here. And it would also be nice to have had more information on some early (c. 1696) chinoiserie attributed to the engraver, publisher and scenery designer Robert Robinson (?1651-1706): works probably inspired by Chinese export paintings and the illustrations in Johan Niehof's Embassy (trans. 1669). The panel in the exhibition shows a misty and mysterious looking gorge with a fishing boat and figures picking their way along the rocks. There are more of these panels in the V&A.

Landscapes and Silences

The last two posts have discussed glimpses of landscape in nature poetry and poems of place, history and memory. In contrast, the Irish poet Geoffrey Squires describes landscapes directly but in much more general terms. In Landscapes and Silences (1996) for example, there are only vague clues as to the location: 'ancient stone houses', 'a government hotel' (which government?), 'metal barns on stilts'. And the poet is equally disinclined to pin down details of the natural world: 'on the house a blue climbing plant / whose name I forget', 'the scent of thyme or some other herb', 'some small animal or bird rooting around in the dead leaves.' It seems 'impossible to gather into perception' the 'tangle of nearness', although the mind's 'seeming inability to fix on anything... is itself an advantage'. He writes about a psychological landscape where 'pale white light... seems to drain things of themselves / leaving no substance no solidity'.

The excellent Shearsman Books site includes two free e-books by Geoffrey Squires: Lines (2006) and So (2007). It's worth also looking on their site at a collaboration between Kate Ashton and Gerrit Offringa, Waddenzee (2006), which describes the landscape of Friesland.

Postscript: there is now a French translation of Landscape and Silences...

 

The edges of rainflood

Colin Simms is a naturalist and much of his poetry describes landscape incidentally, through the experience of birds and animals. In 'Gos in Autumn' for example, one of the seasonal poems in Goshawk Lives (1995), set 'mainly in Northumberland and North Yorkshire in Northumbria', Simms describes the bird in flight over Crosscliffe and Raincliffe, with the crossgraining of 'leaf and light light leaf light light green light'. The poem soars over hills and dales, noting 'the edges of rainflood', 'anvil clouds on unstable air', 'horizontalling wind', 'ditches white in powderice and ice on old leaves.' There are lines like this: 'mist across rich edges music moving the beginnings of taken ideas and moods dancing on air.' Basil Bunting's influence is clear in the writing, and the last poem in Goshawk Lives describes the arrival of a pair of goshawks on Bunting's birthday, 1st March, 1985.

There is a review of a more recent collection dedicated to the gyrfalcon here and another review of Otters and Martens here - "my problem with this collection of excellent poems is the very strict theme. Every poem is about otters, or martens. It’s true the title is a bit of a giveaway, but even so…" Well I have to admit I wouldn't recognise a goshawk if one ever flew down to Stoke Newington, but I like the idea of a whole volume dedicated to one type of bird. There are five examples of Colin Simms poems online here. And Simms gets a couple of recommendations on this recent thread about nature writing.

Pendle Hill

Harriet Tarlo’s essay ‘Radical Landscapes’, published last year in Jacket 32 lists linguistically innovative poets who ‘have complex and thought-provoking slants on locality, pastoral, land politics and ecology/environment. A non-definitive list of such writers would include Allen Fisher, Peter Larkin, Tony Baker, Richard Caddel, Alan Halsey, Maggie O’Sullivan, Frances Presley, Elaine Randell, Gavin Selerie, Tilla Brading, Jennifer Chalmers, Thomas A. Clark, Martin Corless-Smith, Ian Davidson, Harry Gilonis, Giles Goodland, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Bill Griffiths, Randolph Healy, Nicholas Johnson, Trevor Joyce, Peter Larkin, Helen MacDonald, Barry MacSweeney, Billy Mills, Geraldine Monk, Wendy Mulford, Peter Philpott, Peter Riley, Jeremy Prynne, Maurice Scully, Colin Simms, Geoffrey Squires and Catherine Walsh.’

You wouldn’t necessarily think of some of these writers as ‘landscape poets’ in the sense of having continually written observational poetry about their environment. Geraldine Monk, for example is someone whose writing, according to Tarlo in another essay, ‘'Home-Hills': Place, Nature and Landscape in the Poetry of Geraldine Monk’, treats landscape indirectly and critically, challenging the ‘idealising and pastoral tendencies common in ‘nature poetry’. Monk’s Interregnum is about Pendle in Lancashire, connecting the present day landscape to its dark history as the scene of the Witch Trials of 1612. It includes a series of modern encounters with Pendle Hill - by hikers, bikers, ‘Born Agains’ and ‘Pagans’, each of whom seem to claim the site for themselves. The poem then turns to a fox (hunted like the witches) and looks down on the human elements in the landscape through the eyes of a bird, soaring ‘across uncontrolled / airspace and / forests’. Here we see another feature of contemporary post-pastoral poetry, a rejection of the anthropocentric and an embrace of the ecocentric.

Pendle Hill
(source: Wikimedia Commons)

So far the only poets in Harriet Tarlo’s list who have been discussed on this site are Ian Hamilton Finlay and Thomas A. Clark. So in my next two posts I intend to say something briefly about two more: Colin Simms (whose ‘Rushmore Inhabitation’ is quoted in the ‘Radical Landscapes’ article) and Geoffrey Squires.