Toward the Sea

I've only just spotted an excellent article published in January on 'Music and Landscape' by Tom Service. It discusses some of the composers connected with particular landscapes, but cautions against seeing a direct link with the form of their music.  'You can find the musical things that supposedly tie Elgar to the Malverns in thousands of other pieces of music: if it's undulating melodies and harmonic lushness you're after, then Richard Strauss or Gustav Mahler might as well be composers of Worcestershire as of Bavaria or Austria.'  Music inspired by landscape tends to be personal and derived from experience, rather than straightforwardly illustrative.  Connections between music and landscape are ultimately based on 'their shared temporality. To walk in a landscape – or even to drive through it – is not just to physically place yourself in it, it's to imagine it, as well; to listen to a piece of music isn't just to experience the vibrations of frequencies and overtones, it's to imagine what the music is, how it makes you feel.'  

The article centres on the description of a walk on the beach at Sanday, the island in Orkney, with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies.  Just as Wordsworth composed poetry while he walked, Maxwell Davies ('Max') uses the beach as a three-dimensional stave.  'Looking at a dune a mile or so ahead of us, he explained that he says to himself: "OK, I need to get from B major to A flat major in the time it takes me to walk there." In his musical imagination, Max slows time down, and a harmonic transition that might take only seconds in performance is extended exponentially so that he can analyse and experience the notes from any angle, ironing out any infelicities he hears with the tread of his feet in the sand. The beach, its forms and its flotsam, are also part of his pieces. He told me that if a seagull mews overhead, or if he sees a sea-sculpted piece of kelp on the beach, they may nudge his imagination in a direction he hadn't considered and be written into the fabric of the music.'  I see I included a similar quotation from Maxwell Davies in a post I did on him here three years ago (if you look back you'll see I was frustrated that his website wasn't working - I'm glad to report it is now.)

Tom Service also wrote about his visit to Maxwell Davies on The Guardian's music blog in September last year, and in the following post, 'Composing the Sound of the Sea', he mentioned him again, speculating that the composer's second symphony, 'inspired by the wave-forms he saw in the sea beneath him' on the cliffs at Hoy, 'is up there with music's most successful evocations of the sea.'  His other contenders are:

• Debussy - La Mer ('Debussy paid a fisherman to take him out in a storm off the coast of Brittany as part of his preparation for this piece; like Turner before him, he wanted to experience the violence of the sea before he represented it')
• Sibelius - The Oceanides ('A seductive round-dance of waves, nymphs, and orchestral colour')
• Britten - Peter Grimes ('The sea as psychology')
• Bax - Tintagel ('The sea as big tune – nothing wrong with that')
• Xenakis - Kyania  ('Without risking your own life in the teeth of a Mediterranean storm, listening to Kyania puts you at the centre of a sonic surge of massive, implacable intensity')

There are not many alternative suggestions in the comments underneath the article, although one person mentions Takemitsu's Toward the Sea ('moonlit sea, suggestion of bloody great whales beneath' - this is a reference to the fact that it was written for Greenpeace's Save the Whales campaign).  Nice also to see someone refer to Ocean by my favourite band, The Velvet Underground.

A Prospect of Vapourland

Sir Joshua Reynolds, Horace Walpole, c. 1756-7

Source: Wikimedia Commons

You have to love Horace Walpole - aesthete, antiquary, art historian, man of letters, man of enthusiasms, inventor of the Gothic novel and designer of the extraordinary house at Strawberry Hill.  Simon Schama has a good story in Landscape and Memory about the young Walpole seeking out picturesque scenery in the Alps.  Walpole wrote, "I had brought with me a little black spaniel of King Charles’s breed, but the prettiest, fattest, dearest creature! I had let it out of the chaise for the air, and it was waddling along, close to the head of the horses, on top of one of the highest Alps, by the side of a wood of firs. There darted out a young wolf, seized poor Tory by the throat, and before we could possibly prevent it, sprung up the side of the rock and carried him off."  As Schama says, 'Walpole was the son of the formidable Whig prime minister Sir Robert Walpole, and until the lamentable encounter with the wolf had obviously enjoyed having a silk-eared, sycophantic ‘Tory’ in his lap.'

Tory wasn’t the only pet of Walpole’s that met a sticky end. When his cat drowned in a goldfish bowl it prompted Thomas Gray, Walpole’s traveling companion in the Alps, to write his ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat’ (1748):

‘Twas on a lofty vase’s side,
Where China’s gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers, that blow;
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima reclined,
Gazed on the lake below…

When Selima reached out for a fish she ‘tumbled headlong in. Eight times emerging from the flood / She mewed to every watry god, Some speedy aid to send.’ But all in vain. And thus Gray warned ‘ye beauties’ (women!) ‘not all that tempts your wand’ring eyes / And heedless hearts is lawful prize; Nor all that glisters gold.’

This Chinese vase can be seen in a wonderful exhibition currently showing at the V&A, along with other items from Walpole's collection: Renaissance maiolica, medieval coins, a French suit of armour, an Italian shield, old master paintings, portait miniatures (he was an expert on these), a sixteenth century book of swan marks, Cardinal Wolsey's hat, Dr Dee's mirror, a lock of Mary Tudor's hair and a carved limewood cravat which Walpole wore, together with the 'gloves of James I', to greet a party of guests to Strawberry Hill in 1769.  Some exhibits reminded me of objects I've considered on this blog before.  For example, there were two views of Strawberry Hill by Paul Sandby, part of a Sheldon tapestry, and a cup and saucer in the style of Wedgwood's Green Frog Service with delicate painted views of Richmond Castle, the Mausoleum at Castle Howard and Stoke Gifford in Gloucestershire.  Walpole, like Bruce Chatwin, loved the stories connected with objects.  It's easy to see how desirable, for example, he would have found Alexander Pope's own copy of The Iliad, the very book used to make Pope's celebrated translation.  This small volume has a sketch on the flyleaf drawn by the poet himself, showing Twickenham seen from Pope's Grotto.

Last week I wrote about landscapes viewed from a specific house, where the real subject of the painting is the house itself.  Walpole commissioned sketches of this kind, including a striking View from the Holbein Chamber by Joseph Charles Barrow, in which two figures are seen approaching through a strange tunnel of trees, like characters in a Gothic novel.  However, the most unusual painting in the exhibition is a dream landscape in which a distant hill takes on the form of a lion and a nearby tree is full of snakes. Painted in 1759 by Walpole's friend Richard Bentley, who helped design the Gothick rooms of Strawberry Hill, its title is A Prospect of Vapourland.

Johann Heinrich Müntz, Strawberry Hill, c. 1755-59

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The bright sun was extinguish'd

Source: NASA Earth Observatory

With flights grounded following the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull and a cloud of volcanic ash covering the country, causing spectacular sunsets, it seems a good moment to recall Jonathan Bate's account of the impact another eruption had on Romantic poetry.  In 1815, the volcano of Tambora, in Indonesia, blasted dust into the stratosphere and cooled global temperatures.  'The effect lasted for three years, straining the growth-capacity of life across the planet. Beginning in 1816, crop failure led to food riots in nearly every country in Europe. Only in 1819 were there good harvests again'. (The Song of the Earth, 2000 p97).  It 'rained in Switzerland on 130 out of the 183 days from April to September 1816. The average temperature that July was an astonishing 4.9º Fahrenheit below the mean for that month in the years 1807-24'.  And it was during that gloomy summer that Lord Byron composed his poem ‘Darkness’ on the shores of Lake Geneva: 

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went--and came, and brought no day...

John Keats wrote his 'Ode to Autumn’ in September 1819.  Jonathan Bate argues that this poem celebrates the end of the failed harvests caused by the eruption of Tambora. In August Keats wrote to his sister Fanny:  "The delightful Weather we have had for two Months is the highest gratification I could receive--no chill'd red noses--no shivering--but fair atmosphere to think in..."  And here's the famous opening stanza of Keats' poem:

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells.

1819 was Keats' great year, when he composed his other major odes, finished 'The Eve of St Agnes' and wrote 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci.'  He also fell in love with Fanny Brawne.  Wentworth Place, where Keats lived next door to the Brawnes, has been newly restored.  We paid it a visit last week and found its grey rooms, lit by the spring sunshine, less melancholy than might have been expected.  After such a long bleak winter it was a relief to enjoy the garden in "delightful Weather" that would have gladdened the poet.  This garden is a lovely spot to sit in and read, or play hide and seek, or admire the old mulberry tree that Keats himself would have seen as he looked out on the orchard. 

The old mulberry tree in the garden at Keats House,
photographed last week

The North Gate of the Citadel

Back in 2007 I wrote briefly here on my return from Copenhagen about the landscapes of Christen Købke. On Sunday I was able to see more of the artist's work at an exhibition here in London, Christen Købke: Danish Master of Light.  In the context of the National Gallery it was easy to draw parallels with oil sketches on show there by other once-underrated artists: Thomas Jones, Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes et al.  Købke followed in the footsteps of Jones and others, making the trip to south to Naples, but his best work was done in and around Copenhagen.  Wherever he worked, he seems to have followed the advice of his artistic mentor, Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg: "paint from nature, no matter what it might be."

My earlier post included his painting Frederiksborg Palace in the light of evening, 1835, which shows a famous national landmark full on.   In contrast, the view below is dominated by just one of the palace towers.  The tower is a synecdoche for the palace which is a synecdoche for Denmark itself (the Danish kings and queens were crowned there).  Another larger painting, Roof Ridge at Frederiksborg, is mostly empty sky, making it seem almost abstract.  Again it shows the landscape outside the palace, rather than the palace itself, but the location is clear from the presence of one of these signature towers in the bottom left.  I suppose the owner of such a painting would be able to imagine themselves living in and looking out from the palace itself.  Købke's paintings reminded me of the view we used to have from our old flat (although this was hardly a palace and the tower outside was nineteenth century decoration).

Christen Købke, One of the Small Towers on Frederiksborg Castle,
c. 1834-5

Source: Wikimedia Commons

View from the window of our old flat, Tufnell Park

Many of Christen Købke's paintings depict the Citadel - the kind of unusual, politically charged landscape that would draw the interest of contemporary artists (not to mention BLDGBLOG and Pruned).   The Citadel (Kastellet) is a series of fortifications near Copenhagen originally designed in 1626 for King Christian IV (who was also responsible for building most of Frederiksborg palace). In Købke's time it was a barracks with its own church, mill and bakery, a self sufficient community that included both soldiers and prison labourers.  Købke doesn't devise idealised scenes - the view below with its cropped figures and precise lighting looks like a photograph - but the paintings all feature his warm palette and soft Vermeer lighting. Købke grew up in the Citadel (his father was a master baker there) and these views of gateways, bridges and embankments clearly had a strong personal significance for him.

Christen Købke, The North Gate of the Citadel, 1834

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Paddle to the Sea

I have written here before about David Nash's Wooden Boulder which took twenty-five years to be carried from a Welsh river to the open sea.  Nash documented its slow progress through the landscape, but has now lost sight of it.  "The wooden boulder was last seen in June 2003 on a sandbank near Ynys Giftan. All creeks and marshes have been searched so it can only be assumed it has made its way to the sea. It is not lost. It is wherever it is.”

I've just been watching with my three year old son the short film, Paddle to the Sea, made in 1966 by Bill Mason. It follows the journey of a small wooden canoe, carved by a lonely boy in the woods of west Ontario, as it is carried by currents through lakes and rivers until eventually being found at the sea by a lighthouse keeper.  He releases it back into the Atlantic Ocean where, like Nash's boulder, its ultimate destination is unknown.

How different they are - a huge wooden boulder that Nash was unable to transport, slowly pushed to the sea when the currents are powerful enough to move it, and a light model canoe floating at the mercy of the elements.  One makes its way down to the Atlantic through the river Dwyry, the other is carried across twenty-two thousand miles of the vast Canadian landscape.  Paddle to the Sea was immediately lost to its creator, whilst the Wooden Boulder became a constant presence for Nash over a period of twenty five years.  Nash's work was accidental and its narrative unfolded by chance, whilst Mason's film is fictional, based on an original picture book by Holling C. Holling, published in 1941.

On the Criterion site Michael Koresky gives a good description of the film and describes the efforts Mason went to, taking 'the exact route through the Great Lakes and down the Saint Lawrence River illustrated in the book—both a visualization of Holling’s work and a pilgrimage. ...  The most dangerous part of the shoot was, unsurprisingly, at Niagara Falls, where Mason dropped his 16 mm camera, secured by a line anchored to a telephone pole, eighty feet down the fierce waterfall.  The filmmaking adventures notwithstanding, Paddle to the Sea is perhaps more remarkable for the patience and contemplative silences of its storytelling, beautifully typified in the placid exterior of its impervious main character. Though it’s never fully anthropomorphized by the film’s narration, the piece of wood becomes a character in its own right. Even when threatened by curious wildlife, including sea snakes, gulls, and frogs, or the looming machinery and pollution of mankind, Paddle simply smiles, an oasis of serenity amid nature’s unstoppable, alternately merciless and merciful, flow. In one of Mason’s most extraordinary moments, the tiny carved figure floats, still and upright as ever, silhouetted against a sky of blooming Fourth of July fireworks in Detroit harbor; he’s either oblivious to these odd, man-made pleasures or watching intently with alien awe, but the narrator refuses to impose a reading.'

Harbour and Room

There is a beautiful watercolour from 1935 in the Dulwich Picture Gallery's Paul Nash: The Elements, called Empty Room.  It shows an ordinary space with a wooden floor, simple skirting board and a Victorian door, just like the room in which I'm writing this.  But a tree stump rises from the floor, cliffs make up the wall to the left, the ceiling merges into a grey sky and a cold sea is visible in the distance.  It is one of several paintings Nash did in which a landscape appears like a dream inside an empty room.  The opening out of an enclosed space seems to imply escape and release, although in this case, as James King has observed, the dead tree and white cliffs are a premonition of death.

In an earlier watercolour shown in the exhibition, Harbour and Room (1931), part of the floor is made up of water and again we are looking not at a blank wall but at the view out to some stationary boats and beyond them the sea.  Nash's wife Margaret recalled that this harbour was Toulon and the idea came from the reflection of a ship in a large mirror in front of their hotel bed.  Andrew Causey has associated this image with a kind of death: 'the waters of unconsciousness invade the room; they are the kind of death that happens at night when the conscious self is resigned to sleep and dream' (1971, quoted in this exhibition catalogue).

A third example, Three Rooms (1937) depicts, sky, forest and water in the midst of three different rooms.  The symbolism in Nash is never straightforward - Andrew Causey sees the top room, with its ceiling open to the sky as having 'a sense of liberation' and the claustrophobic wooded room in the middle as 'a point of birth' - the lowest room, in which the floor leads out towards a setting sun, links to the other two.  James King has also had a go at explaining it: 'the dominant force is the rising sun. ... the sea can invade and bring destruction to any human life; the presence of the sun here, nevertheless, suggests that such forces can be conquered. ... there is a realm of existence beyond the forest depicted in the interpenetration of room and sky; the emphasis on the aerial in the top image points to a realm 'beyond' - the forces of undoing can be conquered' (1987, quoted in this exhibition catalogue).

Paul Nash, Three Rooms, 1937

Source: Tate Gallery - public domain (image added 2017)

Is there a wider subgenre of landscapes merging with interior space?  Surrealists like Max Ernst and René Magritte combined interior and exterior elements in a similar fashion to Nash.  They and Nash were working in the wake of Giorgio de Chirico, whose Wooded Interior (1926) can be likened to the second of Paul Nash's Three Rooms.  You can see Wooded Interior at the Christie's website, where they describe it thus: 'the setting of the room contains detailed architectural moldings and patterned wallpaper; a mysterious, densely wooded landscape, rooted in the floorboards and pushing upward into the ceiling intrudes on one side of the room; yet most amazing of all are the sea waves that roll in from some unseen horizon.'  However, for me the difference is that de Chirico's painting deploys landscape elements in a surreal interior collage whilst Nash's rooms seem to open onto abstract dream landscapes.

It was a short step from collages on canvas to collages in actual rooms and one of the Surrealist exhibitions prefigures later installation art by including what appeared to be part of a landscape.  For the 1938 'Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme' in Paris, Marcel Duchamp ('generator-arbitor' of the exhibition) designed part of the room as a pool with water-lilies and reeds (Wolfgang Paalen was put in charge of 'water and brushwood').  Looking backwards from the Surrealists, there is an engraving mentioned as an influence by de Chirico, a Symbolist precursor to the convergence of room and seascape in Nash: Max Klinger's Accorde, from his Brahmsphantasie (1894), a set of illustrations inspired by the music of Brahms.

The idea that a room could become a landscape has inspired trompe l'œil wall paintings since Roman times (see my recent post on the Garden Room at Prima Porta).  I gather mural painting has come back into vogue recently, although modern building technology has created glass walls with the potential to 'bring the landscape' into a living room.  But looking at Nash's paintings I wasn't really imagining these architectural landscape rooms.  The images that came immediately to mind immediately were from Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, where a forest grows in hero Max's bedroom.  The idea that a world might lie behind a room is found in other children's literature - who hasn't fantasised about a snowy wood reachable by entering their wardrobe?  But I'll end here with Ray Bradbury's chilling reversal of the idea in his story 'The Veld', where a high-tech children's nursery is installed with 'crystal walls' showing a three dimensional view of the African landscape, its ceiling 'a deep sky with  hot yellow sun'.  The simulation is enhanced with realistic heat, smells and sounds, and in the distance can be seen a pride of lions... 

Postscript: The YouTube clips originally embedded here are no longer available...  However, Nash's paintings are now out of copyright so I have added one of the images to this post.

The Ascent of Mount Ventoux

Ten years ago we spent a pleasant few days in Avignon and I remember wandering around trying to picture the city in the time of Petrarch - not easy with Jeff Koons' giant floral puppy installed in the middle of the Papal Palace.  We had rather cloudy weather but on the last day the sky was somewhat clearer and we suddenly became aware of Mount Ventoux, its summit visible, floating in the hazy distance.  Then it was easy to imagine Petrarch's desire to climb the mountain, a feat he apparently achieved one day in 1336, his only motive 'the wish to see what so great a height had to offer.'

Petrarch's letter describing the ascent draws moral lessons from his tendency to vacillate and climb by the easiest paths: he who ascends by the most direct route will reach the spiritual heights more quickly.  Nevertheless, there is a moment at the summit where Petrarch, like a modern climber, stops to admire the landscape.  He gazes far off towards the mountains around Lyon, the bay of Marseilles, and 'the sea that beats against the shore of Aigues-Mortes'.  It is at this point, however, that he reaches for his trusty copy of Augustine's Confessions and opens it by chance at a passage that makes him feel ashamed and decide to start down the mountain again.  'And men go about admiring the high mountains and the mighty waves of the sea and the wide sweep of rivers and the sound of the ocean and the movement of the stars, but they themselves they abandon.'

Francesco Petrarch, Justo de Gante, C15

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Petrarch's Italian poems, the Canzoniere, show in certain images a real feeling for landscape - certainly this is the impression I get from Mark Musa's translations (which were read through before publication by Charles Tomlinson, the author of many landscape poems.)  The most notable example is number 129, ‘Di pensier in pensier, di monte in monte’ which begins 'From thought to thought, mountain to mountain top / Love leads me on.'  A full translation by A. S. Kline is given below (as the website says it "may be freely reproduced"). Note the way Petrarch projects an image of Laura onto the landscape: 'Many times I have seen here vividly / (now, who will believe me?) in clear water / and on green grass, and in a beech trunk, / and in a white cloud...'  This is a good example of the phenomenon I've mentioned a few times recently in connection with the Deleuze/Guattari theory of faciality.

Love leads me on, from thought to thought,

from mountain to mountain, since every path blazed

proves opposed to the tranquil life.

If there is a stream or a fountain on a solitary slope,

if a shadowed valley lies between two hills,

the distressed soul calms itself there:

and, as Love invites it to,

now smiles, or weeps, or fears, or feels secure:

and my face that follows the soul where she leads

is turbid and then clear,

and remains only a short time in one mode:

so that a man expert in such a life would say

at the sight of me: ‘He is on fire, and uncertain of his state.’

I find some repose in high mountains

and in savage woods: each inhabited place

is the mortal enemy of my eyes.

At every step a new thought of my lady

is born, which often turns the suffering

I bear to joy, because of her:

and, as often as I wish

to alter my bitter and sweet life,

I say: ‘Perhaps Love is saving you

for a better time:

perhaps you are dear to another, hateful to yourself.’

And with this, sighing, I continue:

‘Now can this be true? And how? And when?’

Sometimes I stop where a high pine tree or a hill

provides shade, and on the first stone

I trace in my mind her lovely face.

When I come to myself, I find my chest

wet with pity: and then I say: ‘Ah, alas,

what are you come to, and what are you parted from!’

But as long as I can keep

my wandering mind fixed on that first thought,

and gaze at her, and forget myself,

I feel Love so close to me

that my soul is satisfied with its own error:

I see her in many places and so lovely,

that I ask no more than that my error last.

Many times I have seen here vividly

(now, who will believe me?) in clear water

and on green grass, and in a beech trunk,

and in a white cloud, so made that Leda

would surely have said her daughter was eclipsed,

like a star the sun obscures with its rays:

and the wilder the place I find

and the more deserted the shore,

the more beautifully my thoughts depict her.

Then when the truth dispels

that sweet error, I still sit there chilled,

the same, a dead stone on living stone,

in the shape of a man who thinks and weeps and writes.

I feel a sole intense desire draw me

where the shadow of no other mountain falls,

towards the highest and most helpful peak:

from there I begin to measure out my suffering

with my eyes, and, weeping, to release

the sorrowful cloud that condenses in my heart,

when I think and see,

what distance parts me from her lovely face,

which is always so near to me, and so far.

Then softly I weep to myself:

‘Alas, what do you know! Perhaps somewhere

now she is sighing for your absence.’

And the soul takes breath at this thought.

Song, beyond the mountain,

there where the sky is more serene and joyful,

you will see me once more by a running stream,

where the breeze is fragrant

with fresh and perfumed laurel.

There is my heart, and she who steals it from me:

here you can only see my ghost.

Stony ground and trees, with a pool

The heroines of nineteenth century novels are often seen drawing - a desirable accomplishment of course, but also one that could be used to symbolise or demonstrate important attitudes and character traits.  Elinor in Sense and Sensibility, whom I mentioned here recently, is one example.  In addition to being sceptical of picturesque landscape, her admirer Edward is criticised for being insuffiiently appreciative of Elinor's sketches: 'I am afraid, Mamma, he has no real taste. Music seems scarcely to attract him, and though he admires Elinor's drawings very much, it is not the admiration of a person who can understand their worth.'  Then there is Margaret Hale in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855), a book which I think reads like a Jane Austen novel until the moment Margaret travels from London to her home in the New Forest in a train. Here we see her out sketching with an admirer, the lawyer Henry Lennox, who surreptitiously introduces figures into his picturesque landscape:

Margaret brought out her drawing materials for him to choose from; and after the paper and brushes had been duly selected, the two set out in the merriest spirits in the world.

'Now, please, just stop here for a minute or two, said Margaret.  'These are the cottages that haunted me so during the rainy fortnight, reproaching me for not having sketched them.'

'Before they tumbled down and were no more seen. Truly, if they are to be sketched--and they are very picturesque--we had better not put it off till next year. But where shall we sit?'

'Oh! You might have come straight from chambers in the Temple,' instead of having been two months in the Highlands! Look at this beautiful trunk of a tree, which the wood-cutters have left just in the right place for the light. I will put my plaid over it, and it will be a regular forest throne.'

'With your feet in that puddle for a regal footstool! Stay, I will move, and then you can come nearer this way. Who lives in these cottages?'

'They were built by squatters fifty or sixty years ago. One is uninhabited; the foresters are going to take it down, as soon as the old man who lives in the other is dead, poor old fellow!  Look--there he is--I must go and speak to him. He is so deaf you will hear all our secrets.'

The old man stood bareheaded in the sun, leaning on his stick at the front of his cottage. His stiff features relaxed into a slow smile as Margaret went up and spoke to him. Mr. Lennox hastily introduced the two figures into his sketch, and finished up the landscape with a subordinate reference to them--as Margaret perceived, when the time came for getting up, putting away water, and scraps of paper, and exhibiting to each other their sketches. She laughed and blushed. Mr. Lennox watched her countenance.

'Now, I call that treacherous,' said she. 'I little thought you were making old Isaac and me into subjects, when you told me to ask him the history of these cottages.'

'It was irresistible. You can't know how strong a temptation it was. I hardly dare tell you how much I shall like this sketch.'

The 2004 BBC Mini-Series

Elizabeth Gaskell's friend Charlotte Bronte, who died two months after the final installment of North and South was published, also created a heroine accomplished at drawing.  However, Jane Eyre's life is more constrained and she cannot simply walk out and paint picturesque scenes.  Her powerful Romantic imagination is evident in drawings that Mr Rochester asks her to show him.  He finds them 'for a school-girl, peculiar.  As to the thoughts, they are elfish':

These pictures were in water-colours.  The first represented clouds low and livid, rolling over a swollen sea: all the distance was in eclipse; so, too, was the foreground; or rather, the nearest billows, for there was no land.  One gleam of light lifted into relief a half-submerged mast, on which sat a cormorant, dark and large, with wings flecked with foam; its beak held a gold bracelet set with gems, that I had touched with as brilliant tints as my palette could yield, and as glittering distinctness as my pencil could impart.  Sinking below the bird and mast, a drowned corpse glanced through the green water; a fair arm was the only limb clearly visible, whence the bracelet had been washed or torn.

The second picture contained for foreground only the dim peak of a hill, with grass and some leaves slanting as if by a breeze.  Beyond and above spread an expanse of sky, dark blue as at twilight: rising into the sky was a woman’s shape to the bust, portrayed in tints as dusk and soft as I could combine.  The dim forehead was crowned with a star; the lineaments below were seen as through the suffusion of vapour; the eyes shone dark and wild; the hair streamed shadowy, like a beamless cloud torn by storm or by electric travail.  On the neck lay a pale reflection like moonlight; the same faint lustre touched the train of thin clouds from which rose and bowed this vision of the Evening Star.

The third showed the pinnacle of an iceberg piercing a polar winter sky: a muster of northern lights reared their dim lances, close serried, along the horizon.  Throwing these into distance, rose, in the foreground, a head,—a colossal head, inclined towards the iceberg, and resting against it.  Two thin hands, joined under the forehead, and supporting it, drew up before the lower features a sable veil, a brow quite bloodless, white as bone, and an eye hollow and fixed, blank of meaning but for the glassiness of despair, alone were visible.  Above the temples, amidst wreathed turban folds of black drapery, vague in its character and consistency as cloud, gleamed a ring of white flame, gemmed with sparkles of a more lurid tinge.  This pale crescent was “the likeness of a kingly crown;” what it diademed was “the shape which shape had none.”'

This is getting to be quite a long post, but I can't resist ending with one final heroine, Dorothea from Middlemarch, who we see early in George Eliot's novel in a situation that reverses the gender roles of Sense and Sensibility.  It is the occasion of her first meeting with the attractive Will Ladislaw, who will end up as Dorothea's husband, though for now she is still under the sway of dry old Casaubon, and professes not to understand the art of landscape sketching.  Ladislaw is self deprecating about his efforts but Mr Brooke, admires the drawings in Ladislaw's sketch book: 

"Oh, come, this is a nice bit, now. I did a little in this way myself at one time, you know. Look here, now; this is what I call a nice thing, done with what we used to call brio." Mr. Brooke held out towards the two girls a large colored sketch of stony ground and trees, with a pool.

"I am no judge of these things," said Dorothea, not coldly, but with an eager deprecation of the appeal to her. "You know, uncle, I never see the beauty of those pictures which you say are so much praised. They are a language I do not understand. I suppose there is some relation between pictures and nature which I am too ignorant to feel—just as you see what a Greek sentence stands for which means nothing to me." Dorothea looked up at Mr. Casaubon, who bowed his head towards her, while Mr. Brooke said, smiling nonchalantly— 

"Bless me, now, how different people are! But you had a bad style of teaching, you know—else this is just the thing for girls—sketching, fine art and so on. But you took to drawing plans; you don't understand morbidezza, and that kind of thing. You will come to my house, I hope, and I will show you what I did in this way," he continued, turning to young Ladislaw, who had to be recalled from his preoccupation in observing Dorothea. Ladislaw had made up his mind that she must be an unpleasant girl, since she was going to marry Casaubon, and what she said of her stupidity about pictures would have confirmed that opinion even if he had believed her. As it was, he took her words for a covert judgment, and was certain that she thought his sketch detestable. There was too much cleverness in her apology: she was laughing both at her uncle and himself. But what a voice! It was like the voice of a soul that had once lived in an AEolian harp...

No doubt somebody has written a thesis on the role of outdoor sketching in nineteenth century fiction - there must be many other interesting examples...

Ben Lomond, View near Dumbarton

Portrait of Paul Sandby, Francis Cotes, 1761 

 Source: Wikimedia Commons

Upstairs at the Royal Academy, away from the throngs enjoying the Van Gogh exhibition, the Sackler Rooms are a haven of quiet - there's not much danger of having to peer over a crowd of heads there to see Paul Sandby's watercolours.  I hope they get reasonable numbers of people going because it is a fascinating exhibition if you are interested in the history of landscape art.  Sandby lived from 1731 to 1809 and his career covered the whole of the second half of the eighteenth century: in the 1750s he was working in London and publishing etchings on The Analysis of Deformity, a satire on Hogarth's The Analysis of Beauty (1753), and he was still alive to see the new generation of watercolourists at the start of the nineteenth century, outliving poor Thomas Girtin by seven years.  He is also a gift to art historians writing about the politics of landscape, as he started out in 1747 working for the Board of Ordnance on the Military Survey of North Britain, depicted army encampments in London parks in the wake of the Gordon Riots, and spent much of his career working on estate portraits for patrons like the Duke of Cumberland, the 3rd Earl of Bute and James Watman, a paper mill owner, whose premises can be seen below, naturalised within an idyllic rural setting.

A View of Vintners at Boxley Kent, 
with Mr Whatman's Turkey Paper Mills (detail), Paul Sandby, 1794

Source: Austenonly

The exhibition begins with Sandby's map making and you can see how he used pen-and-ink to describe the mountains of Scotland.  He also painted the activity of the surveying party and made some panoramic views of the landscape, such as Ben Lomond, View near Dumbarton (c1747).  One of the pleasures of an exhibition is seeing the physical objects themselves - the full map spread out and the view of Ben Lomond, consisting of several sheets pasted together, attached to a copy Thomas Pennant's Tour of Scotland (1772).  The reason why Sandby's sketch is now inside this book is that it has been 'grangerised'.  Grangerising was the practice of illustrating a book by clipping out and adding pictures taken from other published sources - named after James Granger (1723-1776), whose two volume Biographical History of England (1769) included blank pages for readers to add their own illustrations.

Nowadays it is possible to grangerise electronically - just find your favourite old text on Project Gutenberg and use a Google image search.  One could for example, produce a nice new edition of William Mason's  influential The English Garden: A Poem in Four Parts (1772-82) - Mason lived in Yorkshire and may have introduced Paul Sandby to the ruins of Roche Abbey, the subject of a particularly serene watercolour from c.1780.  Another of Sandby's paintings of antiquities, showing the ruins of Roslin Castle, Midlothian, is interesting because it depicts the amateur artist Lady Frances Scott sketching from nature using a portable camera obscura.  Sandby's interested in technique extended from optical devices to the processes of reproduction and one of his innovations was the introduction of aquatint print-making, which is especially good for lighting effects, as can be seen for example in Chepstow Castle in Monmouthshire, one of his XII Views in South Wales (1775).

Of the estates pictured in the exhibition, Windsor Great Park features most often and the castle can be seen from various angles and at different times of day, including a dramatic storm scene with a streak of lightning and terrified horse.  This was of course the great age of landscape gardening and in his estate portraits Sandby was illustrating the work of famous contemporary designers and architects.  Among those involved in the design of Nuneham, where Sandby painted views of the garden, were a trio who sound like they would have made a great jazz combo: Stiff Leadbitter (house), 'Athenian' Stuart (interiors) and 'Capability' Brown (grounds).  In addition, poet-gardener William Mason created the flower garden there in 1771 (Thomas Love Peacock would later write: 'O'er Nuneham Courtnay's flowery glades / Soft breezes wave their fragrant wings, / And still, amid the haunted shades, / The tragic harp of Mason rings'.)

Sandby also painted the natural features of estates, including their old trees, which could symbolise a family's long ownership of the land.  He was thus one of the first British artists to paint individual species like oak and beech trees, but these too can be seen in wider political terms, as Linda Colley noted last year in an article about the exhibition when it was on show in Scotland. 'Morning, an extraordinary painting of a massive, venerable beech tree set firm in a Shropshire landscape, is, for instance, a powerfully loyalist testament. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1794, five years after the fall of the Bastille and in the midst of war, the painting would have been understood as an allusion to contemporary conservative celebrations of an ancient, organic British constitution as against the recent republican outgrowths of revolutionary France.'

Morning, Paul Sandby, 1794

(Is this the right image?  I think so but my memory is hazy and I'm writing this without access to the catalogue...)

Passievaart, a huge marsh

I finally made it to the Royal Academy's Van Gogh exhibition last weekend - I think it is the first exhibition devoted just to Van Gogh that I've ever been to.  I hadn't anticipated quite how overwhelmingly impressive some of it would be, given the familiarity of the work - it's well worth queuing and braving the crowds to see, if you haven't done so already.  There are about 35 letters, 65 paintings and 30 drawings and I was hooked from the first sketch, which dates from June 1881.  Looking up the relevant letter to Theo on the amazing Van Gogh Museum website, I see he wrote: "I must tell you that Rappard [an artist] was here for 12 days or so, and has now left.  Naturally he sends you his regards.  We went on a fair number of excursions together, several times to the heath at Seppe, among other places, and the so-called Passievaart, a huge marsh."  Although the emphasis in this first room of the exhibition is on Van Gogh's efforts to teach himself drawing, A Marsh seemed to me an impressive enough achievement in itself, combining experiments in mark making with a composition that conveys the misty poetry of the landscape.

Vincent van Gogh, A Marsh, 1881

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

In his review of the exhibition Adrian Searle traces a connection with landscape in the materials van Gogh used. 'Often the artist drew with a pen that he cut himself from the reeds that grew at the margins of Dutch waterways and roadside ditches in Province. He noted that the reeds in the south were better for drawing. For finer work, he also picked up feathers for the quills he cut to make nibs.  It's more than coincidental that reeds and birds also appear in Van Gogh's drawings. I wonder if he ever used river water to dilute his inks, and for the somewhat less successful watercolours that he made. Even the charcoal he used in his early drawings have a connection to the earth itself. Those pollarded willows that appear in his work time and again also provide the charcoal that he used.  Such connectedness would have suited his pantheist view of the world.'

On a Journey, Lodging Beneath the Blossoms

A few posts back I discussed The Maximus Poems of Charles Olson which explore the landscape and history of Gloucester, Massachusetts.  An English reader unfamiliar with the geography of these poems cannot help being struck by the references to familiar place names in unfamiliar settings: starting with Gloucester itself, an ancient landlocked city here but a coastal port in New England.  I wonder how many of these English towns and cities reborn in a new landscape simply referred back to the homes of the colonists without much though to the sites' physical similarities.  Massachusetts has a Dover located in its county of Norfolk, a Lincoln in Middlesex, a Northampton in Hampshire and Olson's Gloucester in Essex.

I was thinking about this after reading a passage in Burton Watson's translation of The Tales of the Heike, which describes the exile of three conspirators to the remote island of Kikai-ga-shimam off the southern coast of Satsuma.  Two of them, Naritsune and Yasuyori had been devotees of the Kumano Shrine and to make their exile bearable they went looking round the island to find a landscape that resembled the Kumano area.  'They found a wonderful spot of woodland and water, festooned here and there with tree leaves the colour of crimson brocade or embroidery; of splendid cloud-topped peaks, seeming as though draped in various shades of blue green gauze; with the mountain scenery, the stands of trees far surpassed anything found elsewhere.  Gazing south one could see a vast expanse of ocean, its waves deeply shrouded in clouds and mist, while to the north, from the soaring mountain crags, a hundred-foot waterfall came cascading down.  The awesome thundering of its waters and the pine winds imparting an aura of holiness made it seem like the waterfall of Nachi, the seat of one of the Kumano deities.  They decided to call this place the mountain shrine of Nachi.'

The Waterfall of Nachi

Source: Wikimedia Commons

And so they continue, labeling one of the peaks Shingū and another Hongū, and naming various other spots after subsidiary shrines in the Kumano area.  Then each day the two exiles 'would carry out their "pilgrimage to Kumano", praying for a return to the capital.'  The prayers work - they are pardoned and leave the island (although their companion, Shunkan, who would not take part in their religious activities, is left behind and dies there).  The Kumano shrine area is now a World Heritage Site, but the location of Kikai-ga-shimam is not clear, so it's hard to know how much poetic license was taken in this re-imagining of a religious landscape.  Three islands boast graves of Shunkan: two called Iōjima, in Kagoshima and Nagasaki, one called Kikai in Kagoshima.  I should add that the actions of Naritsune and Yasuyori in establishing a version of the Kumano site for themselves can be seen in the context of the process of propagation called bunrei which has led to the establishment of over 3000 Kumano shrines throughout Japan.

The Tales of the Heike exists as a text in various versions; the one translated by Burton Watson is the famous Kakuichi text, set down by a biwa hōshi (lute playing minstrel-priest) called Kakuichi in 1371. It describes the defeat of the Heike (also called the Taira Clan) by the Minamoto (or Genji) during the Genpei wars of 1180-85.  Many subsequent stories, plays and films have been based on it, including my favourite Kenji Mizoguchi film, Tales of the Taira Clan (1955).  Although it focuses on power struggles and has some great battle scenes, The Tales of the Heike includes many quieter episodes, like the visit of the retired emperor GoShirakawa to the retreat of Kenreimon'in, daughter of the Taira ruler Kiyomori but now reduced to living in a remote Buddhist retreat.   GoShirakawa looks at the little hall, the Cloister of Tranquil Light, with its garden overflowing with flowers, and composes a poem: 'Cherries on the bank have strewn the pond with petals - / wave-borne blossoms now are in their glory.'

It is not surprising that some of the warlike historical characters in The Tales of the Heike composed poetry.  At this same time the king of England, Richard the Lion Heart, was writing songs and poems (the legend of his rescue by the minstrel Blondel could easily be re-imagined as an episode from the Japanese epic).  One episode in The Tales relates the story of deputy commander in chief Taira Tadanori risking his life by traveling to the capital to try to convince the poet Fujiwara Shunzei, then engaged in compiling the poetry anthology Senzaishū, to include one of his poems. This was politically difficult for Shunzei, but he did publish one of Tadanori's poems anonymously.  I think it captures the longing for nature's timeless beauty in this warlike period - Geoffrey Bownas and Anthony Thwaite translated it in their Penguin Book of Japanese Verse thus: 'The capital at Shiga / Shiga of the rippling waves, / Lies now in ruins: / The mountain cherries / Stay as before.'  Tadanori died in 1184, fighting in the Battle of Ichi-no-tani.  After he had been killed one final poem was found lodged in his quiver, entitled 'On a Journey, Lodging Beneath the Blossoms'.

In a Treeless Place, Only Snow

Alex Ross has featured John Luther Adams more than once in his excellent blog, most recently giving notice that the composer's 'wide-open Alaskan soundscapes are about to descend on the urban jungles of New York and Chicago. On Sunday night, the American Contemporary Music Ensemble plays “In a Treeless Place, Only Snow” and “The Farthest Place.”'  The video below is a short documentary made for The New Yorker about Inuksuit (2009) 'a work for percussion ensemble that is designed to be played outdoors. The title refers to a type of stone marker that the Inuit and other native peoples use to orient themselves in Arctic spaces. The arrangement of rhythmic layers in the score mimics the shape of these lonely sentinels, which sometimes resemble the monolithic shapes of Stonehenge'.

For an earlier profile piece Ross went to meet Adams, taking in a visit to the Museum of the North, where there is an installation (see clip below) called The Place Where You Go to Listen, a 'kind of infinite musical work that is controlled by natural events occurring in real time'. This is inspired by a place on the coast of the Arctic Ocean called Naalagiagvik where, 'according to legend, a spiritually attuned Inupiaq woman went to hear the voices of birds, whales, and unseen things around her. In keeping with that magical idea, the mechanism of “The Place” translates raw data into music: information from seismological, meteorological, and geomagnetic stations in various parts of Alaska is fed into a computer and transformed into an intricate, vibrantly colored field of electronic sound.'

Reading the profile I was particularly interested in how Adams hears the landscape.  Ross writes: 'I noticed that Adams was listening closely to this seemingly featureless expanse, and kept pulling information from it: the fluttering of a flock of snow buntings, the low whistle of wind through a stand of gaunt spruce, the sinister whine of a pair of snowmobiles. He also noted the curiously musical noises that our feet were making. Tapping the crust of snow atop the ice, under which the wind had carved little tunnels, he compared the sounds to those of xylophones or marimbas.'  At another point, 'Adams recalled the Yukon River trip that led him to write “Strange and Sacred Noise” and other tone poems of natural chaos. “When the ice breakup comes, it makes incredible sounds,” he said. “It’s symphonic. There’s candle ice, which is crystals hanging down like chandeliers. They chime together in the wind. Or whirlpools open up along the shore or out in the middle of the river, and water goes swirling through them. Or sizzle ice, which makes a sound like the effervescent popping you hear when you pour water over ice cubes.'

Double Tide

In recent editions of Sight and Sound Jonathan Romney has written about the trend for Slow Cinema - 'a cinema that downplays event in favour of mood, evocativeness and an intensified sense of temporality'.  Nick James, in his editorial for the April 2010 issue, sounds a cautionary note.  'Watching a film like the Berlin Golden Bear-winner Honey - a beautifully crafted work that, for me, suffers from dwelling too much on the visual and aural qualities of its landscape and milieu - there are times, as you watch someone trudge up yet another woodland path, when you feel an implicit threat: admit you're bored and you're a philistine.  Such films are passive-aggressive in that they demand great swathes of our previous time to achieve quite fleeting and slender aesthetic and political effects...'  Nevertheless, later in this same issue, Jonathan Romney, reporting from the Berlin Film Festival, praises two 'minimalist explorations of landscape', Alexej Popogrebski's How I Ended This Summer and Sharon Lockhart's Double Tide.

Popogrebski's film, made over three months on location at an Arctic weather station is not Slow Cinema - it is more of an 'adventure in outward-bound film-making in the Flaherty-Herzog tradition'.  But Double Tide is as slow as it gets, consisting as it does of two fifty-minute takes from a fixed camera, framing a view of misty mudflats on the Maine coast.  Romney writes that this 'is as close to a picture of nothing as a representational film can get: by comparison, Kiarostami's Five is pure Jerry Bruckheimer.' During the course of the film a single figure is seen gathering clams while the mist thickens and clears.  This arduous, repetitive work made Romney uncomfortable, although a reviewer for LA Weekly writes: 'it’s awful, backbreaking work, but through the lens of Sharon Lockhart’s camera, it’s also magnificent.' This puts me in mind of those old landscape paintings with picturesque labourers, and makes me wonder whether it would be as easy to overlook their exertions if one were compelled to watch them patiently working for a hundred minutes...

Still from Sharon Lockhart's Double Tide

A Lunar Landscape

Chesley Bonestell was born in 1888, studied architecture in San Francisco and was involved in the design for the Golden Gate Bridge.  He went on to provide matte paintings for movies like Citizen Kane and Only Angels Have Wings before turning to astronomical painting in the early 1940s.  He collaborated with Willy Ley on The Conquest of Space (1949), worked on science fiction films with George Pal and created a huge mural of the lunar landscape for the Boston Museum of Science.  This is now in the Smithsonian and you can see it at their website.  As they explain, 'just as 19th–century artists created huge paintings to help Americans envision the scenic wonders of the West, A Lunar Landscape helped viewers imagine what it would be like to stand on another world. And just as those painters had taken artistic license to enhance the western landscape’s grandeur, Bonestell presented a dramatically lit moonscape with sharp peaks, jagged canyons, and precipitous crater walls.  Photos taken by the first lunar probes showed a very different place. They revealed a gentler, far less dramatic world than Bonestell had envisioned. Recognizing that the mural could no longer be considered accurate, museum officials removed it from display in 1970.'  Which is how it ended up at the Smithsonian.

 
There is a detailed account of Bonestell's career by Ron Miller which discusses the question of why he over-dramatised the lunar landscape and explains some of his methods, including a technique of spherical perspective to show planetary surfaces from high altitudes, and the use of plasticine models, photographed using a pin hole camera to achieve maximum depth of field and then mounted on board to be painted using oil glazes. The Visual Index of Science Fiction Cover Art, VISCO, has in its archive images that Bonestell painted from 1947.  The first of these (above) is not actually a landscape but is so striking that I can't resist including it here.  A few more, showing the landscapes of other worlds, are given below.  Apparently Bonestell himself disliked science fiction and "never read the stuff" but his art works continued to appear on the covers of Astounding and Fantasy and Science Fiction until the late seventies. 

Landscripts

The art works in the Museum of Art and Design show that I mentioned last time involve the transformation of 'organic materials and objects that were once produced by or part of living organisms-insects, feathers, bones, silkworm cocoons, plant materials, and hair-to create intricately crafted and designed installations and sculptures'.  It looks like another landscape-related highlight will be an installation by Xu Bing, who 'will make a shadow version of a 24-foot Song Dynasty painting using only vegetable detritus, weeds, leaves, and roots'.  Xu Bing has also made a series of works called Landscripts which develop ideas I've discussed here before of the Chinese written character and the depiction of a landscape through patterned words. For example, a 2003 version in Sydney's New South Wales Museum was created 'on the large plate-glass windows of the museum lobby' where 'Xu wrote out an image of the landscape visible through them by using Chinese characters to represent the individual landscape elements: for example, a clump of trees was represented by a clump of the Chinese character for tree. When the viewer stood on a marked point on the floor the calligraphy and the objects seen through the window overlapped, resulting in a conflation of text and objects.'

Landscape on the face of Levi Van Veluw

As you can see, the latest edition of Crafts features a man with a landscape on his head.  This is Dutch artist Levi Van Veluw's Landscape I (2008), one of three works he has in the New York Museum of Art and Design's forthcoming exhibition Dead or Alive.  Van Veluw's website includes three others (corresponding to the other seasons) and describes the rationale for his Landscapes series: 'removing plots of grass, clusters of trees, babbling brooks from their intimate 2 dimensional formats and transposing them onto the 3 dimensional contours of his own face. Thus a fresh twist is given to the obsession inherent in the romantic landscape of recreating the world and simultaneously being part of it.'



Van Veluw covers his face in modeling scenery of the kind used for making train sets; no surprise then to see a small train makes its way through a landscape in this video clip.  It made me think that he could transform his head into a live metaphysical painting, with facial features standing in for the enigmatic objects in the foreground of a De Chirico like Ariadne (1913).  Now I think of it there are lots of far fetched possibilities for Landscape-Head series from the history of art - Monet's variations on the same view (something like Roni Horn's You are the Weather), a Salvator Rosa face contrasted to a Claude, Altdorfer's early independent landscapes recreated and re-connected to the figure.  Imposing landscapes on other people's heads would recall eighteenth century landscape parks or idealised views of colonised territory. Or perhaps something exploring landscape and desire, recalling the words of Deleuze and Guattari: "all faces envelop an unknown, unexplored landscape; all landscapes are populated by a loved or dreamed-of face."

Polis Is This

Here's something really good if you haven't already seen it: Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place (the film, in six parts, is embedded below).  It includes reflections on the way Olson wrote about space and place, interviews with poets like Robert Creeley, Amiri Baraka and Jonathan Williams, and Olson's own words spoken by John Malkovich and sung by Ed Sanders of the Fugs.  It's not an experimental film - in some ways it's a fairly typical documentary, with talking heads, archive footage and scenic shots synced to the soundtrack.  The film's website, with a nice sense of humour, describes it's subject in heroic terms: 'Charles Olson the "original aboriginal" fights to save his town from so-called progress as the bullzoder of change rumbles down Main Street USA.  His challenge to us? We must either rediscover the earth or leave it. Have we all become estranged from that which is most familiar? See Polis Is This before the cultural wetlands are completely drained and maybe you can save the place where you live.'

One of the interviewees in Polis Is This is John Stilgoe from Harvard University who says that “the local environment is the prism through which anyone’s understanding of the cosmos is filtered; to look at the outer world from a vantage point in the local. For many people the local landscape was very uninteresting and ordinary, but for him, it was the threshold to the world.”  The documentary actually begins by addressing the viewer on the subject of landscape, asking whether we really see "not just the present surface, but what came before".  Charles Olson wrote about Gloucester, Massachusetts as it was in the fifties and sixties, as it had been in his childhood, and how it had developed and changed since the seventeenth century. His Maximus Poems contain a lot of detail on 'what came before' - some of it rather hard going if you are not that interested in New England history, although another interviewee, poet Robin Blaser says that Olson told him not to bother trying to get his head round all the local detail: "don't do that... this is my place.  Go do it for yours."  (Maybe I will... "I, Plinius of Stoke Newington, to You" etc. etc.)

The complete Maximus Poems that we now have consists of three volumes: The Maximus Poems, published in 1960 (see picture above), Maximus Poems IV, V and VI which appeared in 1968, and The Maximus Poems: Volume 3, published posthumously in 1975.  As you read through them you build up a strong visual picture of Gloucester, past and present, from fragments of description, but it's not really until the very end of the Volume VI that you get what might be called an actual landscape poem: 'The River Map and then we're done'.  It is a fine poem to read and look at, tracing the river like an old chart (Olson based it on a 'Plan of Squam River from the Cut to the Lighthouse' drawn up in 1822), and ending at a seeming oxymoron: 'Rocky Marsh'.  This is Volume VI's penultimate poem: the last consists of just two lines ('I set out now / in a box upon the sea').

It is in Volume 3 of  The Maximus Poems that you'll find some landscape poems reminiscent of others I've discussed here before (Olson sometimes reminds me, for example, of Lorine Niedecker and Guillevic).  On August 6th 1964, Olson wrote a short poem I could imagine stenciled onto the wall of Thomas A. Clark's Cairn Gallery: 'the sky, / of Gloucester / perfect bowl / of land and sea.'  On December 22nd 1965, he described a winter view with high tide and light snow, 'rocks melting into the sea', '... the whole / full landscape a / Buddhist / message...'  Two poems further on he writes of the late afternoon sun and its effects on the landscape - whitening out parts of the view, glistening on the water, bestowing a 'split second of monumentalness' on Stage Head and Tablet Rock. And so it goes on, through the winter of 1966, with Olson meditating on the view out to sea:  Ten Pound Island, Shag Rock, Dog Bar, Half Moon, Round Rock Shoal.  The rest of the sequence returns mainly to history and myth, 'Time's / unbearable complexity', the landscape's deep past: 'Gloucester herself when Earth Herself was One / Continent'.  But in these last poems Olson also continued to write about what he saw and the sad alterations that had made Gloucester 'a mangled mess' - 'now indistinguishable from / the U.S.A.'

Pruitt-Igoe Falls

Cyprien Gaillard's art seems to be getting quite a lot of attention at the moment.  I see that one of his works is included in the new Gagosian Gallery exhibition of art inspired by J. G. Ballard, along with other artists I've discussed here before like Ed Ruscha, Tacita Dean and Dan Holdsworth. Gaillard specialises in showing contemporary architecture as ruins - in this respect the Bugada and Cargnel gallery compares him to '18th century French 'ruiniste' painter' Hubert Robert.  'Whether he commissions a traditional landscape painter to paint colourful views of housing projects in Swiss suburbs, surrounded by their luxurious natural environment (Swiss Ruins, 2005), or introduces a view of a tower-block into a 17th Century Dutch landscape etching (Belief in the Age of Disbelief, 2005), Gaillard shows contemporary architecture as a modern ruin on the verge of being taken over by nature'.

Hubert Robert, Imaginary View of the Grand Gallery of the Louvre in Ruins, 1796

Source: Wikimedia Commons

This gallery site goes on to describe his ongoing project for a 'parc aux ruines', scattering monuments across the world: 'a monumental bronze sculpture of a duck taken from a derelict Modernist neighbourhood of high rise buildings in Paris' taken to the terrace of Berlin's Modernist Neue Nationalgalerie, 'crushed concrete remains of a tower block from the suburban city of Issy-les-Moulineaux laid out on the main ally of a Renaissance castle' and the concrete from a demolished social housing project in Glasgow, 'recycled into a 4 meter high obelisk (Cenotaph to 12 Riverford Road, Pollokshaw, Glasgow, 2008)'.

In an interview with Alix Rule, Gaillard said "You know how the London bridge or some French castles have been moved, rock by rock, and reconstructed? My main project, the work of my life, is to do the same for towerblocks. I mean, they cost a fortune to demolish - if I could somehow use the money (and then find more money), I would relocate them on a big piece of land in the south of France and create a park. There would be a few from Glasgow and Sheffield, and a few from Paris and from Marseille, and a few from Kiev, the same way Piranesi would make a caprice. The place would become a 21st-century park of ruins as well as my sculpture park."

I've included a link below to the video Pruitt-Igoe Falls (2009) which shows the destruction of a Glasgow tower block along with a nocturnal view of Niagara Falls.  Gaillard is quoted in Interview as saying: "When the building fell, the dust from the destruction made its way through the graveyard below us like a ghost, slowly coming to the camera until everything went black. It becomes a natural monument, just like Niagara Falls at night-both subjects are falling, both slowly bring you to obscurity."  The title comes from the failed urban housing project, Pruitt-Igoe in St Louis, which was completed in 1955 and demolished in 1972.