Transforming Landscape Richard Hook University of Wollongong
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2011 Transforming landscape Richard Hook University of Wollongong
Recommended Citation Hook, Richard, Transforming landscape, Doctorate of Creative Arts thesis, Faculty of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong, 2011. http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/3473
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TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE
A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree
Doctorate of Creative Arts
from
University of Wollongong
by
Richard Hook
Faculty of Creative Arts
2011
CERTIFICATION
I, Richard William Hook, declare that this thesis, submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Creative Arts, in the Faculty of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong, is wholly my own work unless otherwise referenced or acknowledged. The document has not been submitted for qualifications at any other academic institution.
Richard William Hook
(date)
2
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Amanda Lawson, for her good advice, forbearance and trust in my ability to get things done, to my colleagues in design and visual arts for their generous good cheer, and to my family for tolerating my slow progress over a very long time. Thanks are also due to Tom Goulder of Duck Print Fine Art Editions in Port Kembla for taking on the large and complex prints, to Bernie Fischer for his care in photographing my work and to Sheila Hall for putting the document in order.
I would like to acknowledge the traditional Indigenous owners of the land I walk through to produce the art. I have tried at all times to tread with care.
3
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page No.
Title Page ...... 1
Certification ...... 2
Acknowledgements ...... 3
Table of Contents ...... 4
List of Figures……………………………………………………………. 5
Abstract: Transforming Landscape ...... 9
Chapter1: Introduction ...... 11
Chapter 2: Landscape Theory...... 30
Chapter 3: Ideology and Landscape ...... 43
Chapter 4: Orientations ...... 64
Chapter 5: Fluid Signifiers ...... 87
Chapter 6: Body Presence ...... 108
Chapter 7: Coastal Architecture ...... 127
In Conclusion…………………………………………………………….. 149
Bibliography ...... 151s
4 LIST OF FIGURES
Page No.
Figure 1.1 Richard Hook, study for Reticulum 2009, acrylic on canvas, 75 x 65 cm...... 12
Figure 1.2 Beach flotsam, Photograph by the author...... 16
Figure 1.3 Richard Hook, Jetty, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 192.5 x 80 cm...... 20
Figure 3.1 Anne McMaster, Kangaroo Bones, Broken Crockery, Drought, 2008, etching ...... 56
Figure 3.2 Christine Willcocks, Birdwood, 2008, solar plate etching ...... 57
Figure 4.1 Guiseppe Penone, Continuera a crescere tranne che in quel punto, 1968, bronze...... 65
Figure 4.2 Steve Tobin, Untitled, 2002, cast bronze, 10 x 14 x 12 ft...... 66
Figure 4.3 Andy Goldsworthy, Cherry leaves, Swindale Beck Wood, Cumbria, November, 1984 ………………………………….. 67
Figure 4.4 Jackson Pollock, The Key (detail), 1946, oil on canvas, 59 x 84 ins...... 75
Figure 4.5 Jackson Pollock, Croaking Movement, c. 1946, oil on canvas, 53.5 x 43.25 ins...... 76
Figure 4.6 Jackson Pollock, Eyes in the Heat, 1946, oil on canvas, 54 x 43 ins...... 77
Figure 4.7 Jackson Pollock, Galaxy, 1947, oil and aluminium paint on canvas, 43.5 x 34 ins...... ……………….. 78
Figure 4.8 Pollock Painting, 1950, Photograph by Rudolph Burckhardt…………………………………………...... 81
Figure 4.9 Pat Steir, September Evening Waterfall, 1991, oil on canvas, 289.6 x 261 cm...... 83
Figure 4.10 Stick chart, Marshall Islands, no date, wood, fibre, shells, 58 cm high...... 84
5 Figure 5.1 Richard Hook, Jetty, 2010, relief print on paper, 167 x 71 cm...... 87
Figure 5.2 Richard Hook, Red Harbour, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 134 x 150 cm...... 92
Figure 5.3 Richard Hook, Submariner #4, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 51 x 133 cm...... 96
Figure 5.4 Photograph by the author, 2011...... 102
Figure 6.1 Fred Williams, Stump, 1976, oil on canvas, 123cm x 123 cm...... 109
Figure 6.2 Gustave Courbert, The Black Well, 1865, oil on canvas, 94 x 131 cm...... 113
Figure 6.3 Jackson Pollock, Full Fathom Five, 1947, oil on canvas with various objects, 50.8 x 30.1 ins ...... 114
Figure 6.4 J.M.W. Turner, Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead. The Author was in this Storm on the Night the Ariel Left Harwich, 1842, oil on canvas, 91.5 x 122cm...... 116
Figure 6.5 Willem de Kooning, North Atlantic Light, 1977, oil on canvas, 203 x 178 cm...... 119
Figure 6.6 Richard Hook, Submariner #1, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 64 x 102 cm...... 120
Figure 6.7 Giuseppe Penone, Respirare L’ombra (To Breathe Shadow), 2000, mixed media, 468 x 549.5 x 7.5 cm...... 121
Figure 6.8 Guy Warren, Gaia’s Refuge, acrylic on canvas, 150 x 180 cm...... 124
Figure 6.9 Per Kirkeby, Forest – Variation 1, 1989, oil on canvas, 200 x 130 cm...... 125
Figure 7.1 Montage of linear structures...... 128
Figure 7.2 Montage of Industrial Still-lifes...... 129
Figure 7.3 Breakwater, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 267 x 59 cm...... 130
Figure 7.4 Montage of port and steelworks structures...... 131
6 Figure 7.5 Richard Hook, Silver, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 59 x 90 cm...... 132
Figure 7.6 Richard Hook, Shipping Lanes, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 64 x 69 cm...... 132
Figure 7.7 Richard Hook, study for Blue Harbour, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 76 x 59 cm...... 133
Figure 7.8 Richard Hook, Blue Harbour, 2008, acrylic on canvas,150 x 120 cm...... 133
Figure 7.9 Richard Hook, study for Off the Harbour, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 76 x 76 cm...... 134
Figure 7.10 Montage of ocean and sky rhythms...... 134
Figure 7.11 Richard Hook, Submariner #3, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 40.5 x 40.5 cm...... 135
Figure 7.12 Richard Hook, Submariner #5, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 51 x 133 cm...... 135
Figure 7.13 Richard Hook, Submariner #6, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 51 x 133 cm...... 136
Figure 7.14 Richard Hook, Study for Tidal Zone II, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 45 cm...... 136
Figure 7.15 Richard Hook, Study for Tidal Zone, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 67 x 72 cm...... 137
Figure 7.16 David Smith, O Drawing, 1957, bronze, 31 x 50 x 9 in...... 140
Figure 7.17 Piet Mondrian, The Sea, 1912, oil on canvas, 82.5 x 92 cm...... 142
Figure 7.18 Piet Mondrian, Pier and Ocean 1, 1914, ink and gouache on paper, 50.2 x 62.9 cm...... 142
Figure 7.19 Piet Mondrian, Pier and Ocean 2, 1914, ink and gouache on paper, 50 x 62.6 cm...... 142
Figure 7.20 Richard Hook, Jetty II, 2010, multicolour relief print on paper, 155 x 45 cm...... 143
Figure 7.21 Richard Hook, Tidal Pool, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 164 x 300 cm...... 145
7 Figure 7.22 Peter Kulka, Ulrich Konig, design for Chemnitz Stadium, 1995...... 146
Figure 7.23 Richard Hook, study for Coastline, 2008, ink on paper...... 147
Figure 7.24 Richard Hook, Coastline, 2008, relief print on BFK Rives, 98 x 61 cm...... 148
8 ABSTRACT: TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE
This exegesis has two main objectives, one to elucidate the paintings and prints, grouped into a relatively coherent body of work under the general title
Coastal Architecture, and the other to establish a theoretical foundation and context for both the artistic production and the critical reception of the work.
Two notoriously difficult and complex ideas - landscape and abstraction - are brought together in the studio work and then dismantled and examined in the writing. In the progressive exploration of different aspects of these two key terms a number of questions arise. For example, what is the relation of visual to verbal metaphor? Can abstraction be thought of outside its conventional opposition to figuration or mimesis? Can a work be descriptive and abstract at the same time? If the figure can be in the landscape, can the body be in the painting? What new experiences and meanings can be brought to the landscape genre that, in the view of many art theorists, has fallen into disuse or worse?
In order to systematically answer these questions I have looked to the writing of American philosopher John R. Searle to provide a foundation for a theory of realism that rejects the idealism and phenomenological bent of much poststructuralist art theory. I have taken a critical analytic approach to some recent ideological critiques of landscape in order to escape their pessimism and limited perspective on contemporary landscape painting. Alongside
Robert Rosenblum’s celebrated tradition of the Abstract Sublime I assert a parallel, unbroken empirical tradition of 20th Century modern landscape art,
9 both figurative and abstract, looking at some of its key breaks with tradition in
Pollock and post-1970s conceptual art. The importance of point of view and bodily orientation is examined historically and then applied to the work in
Coastal Architecture.
Drawing on gestalt theory, semiotics, Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwins’ concept of modality markers and John Searle’s notion of aspects in consciousness, I attempt to demystify the ‘language’ of abstraction by seeing it as a non-mysterious modality within the overall communicative matrix of painting.
In Chapter 6 I extend the discussion of point-of-view by looking at the theme of the figure in the landscape in post- WWII Australian figurative painting in relation to the more elusive notion of the body in abstract painting.
Anthropomorphism in contrast to the body as a dispersed or textural presence is considered. The final chapter organises Coastal Architecture into groups and investigates the use of analogical structures or metaphors that manipulate the organic and the fabricated into new landscapes.
10 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
“Like” and “like” and “like” – but what is the thing that lies beneath the
semblance of the thing? (Woolf, 2000: 123)
The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky,
except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles on it.
Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the
sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes
moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other,
pursuing each other, perpetually.
As they neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept
a thin veil of white water across the sand. The wave paused, and then
drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes
unconsciously. (Woolf, 2000: 3)
Such close observation of the landscape with its scrupulously careful choice of descriptive words, each one laid out in a rhythm of time and consciousness, is exactly how I would like to introduce my paintings. But to attempt such transparency in a verbal introduction is clearly futile because my paintings are, on the face of it, not descriptive at all, but abstract. ‘How could we see them as anything but abstract?’ a colleague asked me recently during a presentation. And this paradox is at the heart of my project, in both the studio and exegesis, which seek to show that description and its others
11 can co-habit the same work, giving it unexpected layers of strength and beauty.
Fig 1.1: Richard Hook, study for Reticulum I, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 75 x 65 cm
Against and within a pale, modulated grey field floats a two-dimensional linear structure composed of dark saturated red-black and blue-black lines, mostly running in an irregular pattern of horizontals but also forming axes with verticals. The lines are alternately sharply defined or slurred, varying in thickness and in character from a strictly ruled, almost diagrammatic character to more irregular, seemingly random, asymmetrical organic 12 branchings, the whole figure defined as a dark figure on a light ground, a kind of reticulum or grid that has been grown in the ground rather than ruled up.
There are some curves or arcs but very few diagonals (as these introduce too much perspective and spatial illusion). There is a suggestion, but only a suggestion, of branches and beams, the organic and the architectural, coalescing and suspended or partly immersed in a fluid medium that could be sky or sea or both.
While you may be able to form an image of sorts from the above description of one of my recent paintings, it is not likely to be clear and complete in the way that Virginia Woolf's sea picture unfolds in the mind's eye. No precise structuring and its effects can be extrapolated from this verbal description, no matter how detailed. It has to be seen to be 'got', and in the seeing is experienced immediately. The painting can certainly be described accurately enough to give us a mental picture, but it lacks the clarity and coherence of
Woolf’s scene; there is little outside the painting that the painting literally matches (or refers to) that we might recognise. While the painting contains recognisable fragments or details, the overall image presents no recognisable visual array in the way a mimetic or naturalistic image does. In this respect it is abstract. Despite having some descriptive content, its mode of communication is not self-evident. The exegesis will attempt to illuminate this function.
From a distance only the light is visible, a speeding gleaming horizontal
angel, trumpet out on a hard bend. The note bells. The note bells the
13 beauty of the stretching train that pulls the light in a long gold thread. It
catches in the wheels, it flashes on the doors, that open and close, that
open and close, in commuter rhythm…
The train was hosed in light. Light battering down on the roof. Light
spraying over the edges in yellow bladed fans. Light that mocked the
steel doors and broke up the closed windows into crystal balls.
(Winterson, 1993: 3, 33)
Jeanette Winterson’s writing is more complicated in its figurative allusions and also more dramatic, full of gold light, fragmentation, movement and sound, almost baroque in comparison with Woolf’s spareness. Both writers seem to want their language to construct clear visual images correlative to the material world, and both writers employ both descriptive and figurative modes in order to do it. Winterson, with a painter’s eye, insists that to do justice to the beauty and complexity of the world we need to strain the metaphorical life of language to breaking point. So it is with any painting that avoids simulating the photographic in an attempt to pin down a version of the real, one that refuses any dealings with either the banality of the literal or with fantasy, in Coleridges’ sense of the word: like, but also against poetry; like, but also against photography. The struggle to get at ‘the thing that lies behind the semblance of the thing’ is partly a struggle between metaphoric ways of communicating - letting this stand for that - and the desire, which in painting can’t ever get beyond a desire, to present it directly without mediation.
Woolf evokes an image of waves, an image of a patterned movement in time whose pace is measured in the temporal sequence of the word placement
14 and the time taken to read them. The ordering of words is in successive short phrases, each one adding physical detail as well as advancing the time taken for the waves to break. There are two tropes at work in her image of the sea and sky: cloth and a breathing, sleeping body. The image is made dense by the figures that are simultaneously distinct in our minds, but that also fuse into each other as an indissoluble whole. Woolf's point of view on the scene seems like a fixed long shot, as in filmic perspective, while Winterson's view of the train jumps from point to point, creating a montage of reflected light.
These two passages of writing, both building clear visual images through descriptive and figurative language, introduce my paintings that, in their turn, present visual images that are built out of both descriptive and metaphorical elements in very similar ways to the writing, which suggests that the logic of abstraction in painting (at least of a certain kind) might be similarly accessible.
In my description of Reticulum 1 I can't avoid recourse to metaphor as it is integral to the visual 'language' of the painting.
Visual metaphors are a subclass of visual images - symbols whose elements are recognized perceptually. Moreover, there is a striking structural analogy between what I am calling visual metaphors and verbal metaphors: namely, where verbal metaphors are frequently advanced via grammatical structures that appear to portend identity - such as the "is" of identity or apposition - visual metaphors use pictorial or otherwise visual devices that suggest identity in order to encourage metaphorical insight in viewers.
15 If a metaphor is a representation in a verbal or visual medium, then seeing one thing in terms of another in the world is an imaginative interpretation in the act of perception. Such a case we might see as analogical perception, as distinct from strictly anthropomorphic kinds of representation, as with the pathetic fallacy or simulacra. Finding analogies in the non-human world is more a case of an experiential seeing-as, according to Gestalt psychology.
Metaphor and anthropomorphism share the characteristic of one thing seen in or as another, but metaphors are second order representations, unlike perceptions.
Fig 1.2: Beach flotsam, (photograph by the author)
This photograph illustrates a feature of perceptual experience in which the analogical can be found in the physical world, potentially as drawing, not only in its figure/ground formation, but also in its anthropomorphic suggestiveness.
The drawing is already in potentia in the source. Our habit of seeing one thing in terms of another further complicates the attempt to make a clear and objective description of the world. Furthermore, many images in Coastal
Architecture are not visual metaphors in the strict sense; they operate more as suggestive analogies and are, importantly, symmetrical insofar as no form is privileged in the comparisons being made. As John Berger speculates in his essay, 'On Visibility': 16
Aim: to see the appearance of a thing (even an inanimate thing) as a
stage in its growth - or as a stage in a growth of which it is part. To see
its visibility as a kind of flowering. (Berger, 1985: 219)
As a modernist, Woolf clearly believes that appearances are not reality. She suggests that art can’t get beyond ‘semblance’, that we are always stopped short at one remove from the real, having to be content with ‘like’ instead of
‘is’. Semblance, of course, shouldn't be confused with surface - the ordinary surface appearance of things in the world that modern painting, including abstraction, have tried to ‘see’ through and beyond in the effort to get at a deeper truth, but it is related. Her description of the breaking waves is able to incorporate movement - to present time through change - not as a static reference, but as a dramatic playing out of an event through the performative reading operation integral to the writing-reading experience (the phenomenology of its performance). In other words, her writing is a script brought to life in the performance of reading, aloud or silent making no difference to its vitality as an image. In its incorporation of movement and time, the writing issues a challenge to painting.
A traditional painting that employs a system of perspective (fixed spatial vectors) cannot 'perform' change and time in the same way, being instantaneously perceived from a fixed position. It may be able to suggest time through narrative before-and-after devices, but this doesn't offer us an experience of real time as Woolf does. The problem of presenting the
17 experience of real time in painting, to be discussed in a later chapter, reminds us, in Matisse's famous dictum that 'exactitude is not truth', that an imperative of modern painting from Cubism on has been to account for the fourth dimension and scales of reality not available to the unaided eye. We can form a clear picture on the basis of Woolf's description, and in fact we could only comprehend it through the formation of a mental image as our reading progresses. However, the experience of a painting doesn't require a symmetrical verbal translation in order to comprehend it. It is given altogether in the moment as visual, and while this fact may be obvious, it is of critical importance to the painter and painting theory.
Tall cliffs. White. With straight horizontal lines of dark flashing grey flint.
Between the lines centuries of chalk deposit.
The fringe of the cliffs against the sky, grass hanging over.
The thickness of the turf in relation to the height of the cliffs like the
thickness of an animal's fur. At the height of the grass gulls wheeling.
Figures of eight cut off by the cliff. The shadow of the cliffs on the sea
(the tide is in, almost up to the cliffs.)
the shadow of the cliffs on the sea, lying on the sea, from the water's
edge to eighty metres out: the length of the coast. In the shadow of the
cliff the sea is almost brown.
Further out, just beyond the shadow of the grass fringe, the sea is a
green mixed with a little white. The green that oxidised copper goes, but
with sun. As I write this very sentence, the sun comes out above Noel
Road, casts the shadow of the window frame on the curtains, the
18 curtains stir in the window, my pen casts a shadow on this paper and
the sun goes in.
To look:
at everything which overflows the outline, the contour, the category, the
name of what is.
(Berger, 1985: 221)
In this miniature John Berger gives us the interdependence of time, movement, scale and point of view as active forces. He asks: 'What is the meaning to be found in the visible? A form of energy, continually transforming itself.' (Berger, 1985: 220) Here the most straightforward job of description seems elusive and complex in his consciousness of the 'primacy of visibility itself.' (Berger, 1985: 220)
19
Fig 1.3: Richard Hook, Jetty, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 192.5 x 80 cm
20 Having argued for the importance of observing nature closely, it may seem perverse of me to insist that Coastal Architecture be viewed as a work of the imagination, not as truthful documentation. This is not only because painting is inherently non-discursive, at best suggesting connections and possibilities, but also because representing appearances merely opens up the possibility of constructing narratives, not the possibility of new structures.
This requires the operation of the imagination that 'dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate…' (Coleridge quoted in Willey, 1961: 14). In other words, the imagination is transformative of the material selected through observation. Basil Willey notes that:
The 'colouring' without the 'truth of Nature' could yield nothing but
fanciful kaleidoscope-patterns; 'Nature' alone, on the other hand, would
be inanimate and cold. The authentic miracle occurred only when mind
and matter, Imagination and observation, fused together to produce that
which was neither the one nor the other, but both at once: a living
compound, not a mechanical mixture. (Willey, 1961: 22)
I have taken the trouble to describe Reticulum 1 (Fig 1.1) above because the problematic of description, in visual terms picturing or depiction, forms one of the powerful forces that polarises a desire to get at the real, against the equally strong urge to be free of any such restraints through abstraction. The conflict could be articulated as one between figuration and abstraction, but I
21 will argue that such a view both misunderstands the relation of figuration to abstraction and also limits the semantic range of painting.
Like sculpture, painting now belongs to an expanded field, having shed the essentialist purity that Greenberg once advocated, opting instead, in its contemporary hybrid forms, for an impurity in its mediums and in its relationships with other media and history. It might now be more productive to see painting not as a privileged aesthetic category but as a subset of visual discourse in general in which it shares space alongside graphic design, typography, diagrams, signs, hieroglyphs, pictograms, symbols, photographs and so forth; in other words, having no assumed special status of its own.
There are several advantages to taking this position:
- painting can be brought under the umbrella of the theoretical discipline
of discourse analysis.
- under discourse analysis it is not encumbered by its history of
metaphysical hermeneutics.
- it can be treated as a living communication practice rather than an
isolated abstract system.
Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen take this position in their 'grammar of visual design':
…images are polyphonic, weaving together choices from different
signifying systems, different representational modes, into one texture. In
this view, a term such as 'painting' is an artificial construct which brings
together and treats as a homogenous unit what is in reality a complex
22 configuration of different voices, different representational modes.
(Kress and van Leeuwen, 1995: 177)
It (a painting) can be abstract in respect of one modality marker,
naturalistic in respect of another and sensory in respect of yet another,
and this allows a multiplicity of possible modality configurations, and
hence a multiplicity of ways in which artists can relate to the reality they
are depicting, and define ‘reality’ in general. (Kress and van Leeuwen,
1995: 176)
There is a risk that any general theory of the visual image will come to be imposed on forms that may turn out to be particularly resistant. And abstraction, I will argue, cannot be applied as a generic term or imposed as a system on individual works. It has to be inferred from the material image of the work under observation. In eschewing any metaphysics of presence, I will adopt Kress and van Leeuwens’ theory of ‘modality markers’ according to which abstraction, at least in my practice and for the purposes of this exegesis, is not construed as a logically distinct category, but as a set of operations within the field of visual representation in general.
To say that a painting traverses the borderline between figuration and abstraction may also be misleading and this thesis will examine some of the problematics of this relationship. While abstraction, though a century old, is still not self-evident, I would argue that neither is it at all mysterious to an audience familiar with its history. The rhetoric of abstraction was prepared for
23 by the formal and technical innovations of modern figurative painting, especially Symbolism and Expressionism, in their emptying out of content and their rhetorical use of gesture and materials. Modern painting, and especially abstract painting, comes with a complex, ramified history but with no coherent body of rules comparable to 19th Century academic classicism.
Greenberg's formalism and subsequent poststructuralist theories have come closest in recent decades to again supplying a general, prescriptive theory for artists. However, these have limited relevance to my project even though I draw on the work of some poststructuralist writers, for example Gilles
Deleuze in his study of Francis Bacon in The Logic of Sensation and Yves
Alain Bois in Models of Painting. The Anglo-American tradition of linguistic philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Austin and John Searle, especially the latter's critiques of materialism, dualism and phenomenology and his theories of realism and the mind/body problem, will be central to the exegesis.
Bois argues:
'that one does not "apply" a theory; that concepts must be forged from
the object of one's enquiry or imported according to that object's
specific exigency; and that the main theoretical act is to define this
object and not the other way round. To define an object, one has to
know it intimately (on that level "poststructuralism" did not depart from
structuralism; to overturn a critical tradition was in fact their common
goal, but as a starting point this implied a scrupulous investigation of the
object's materiality). (Bois, 1990: xii)
24 Like Bois, I value theory for its explanatory power and don’t look to it to supply a general blueprint for the production or interpretation of the paintings under discussion. The paintings have been developed as much as possible through intuitive processes and a frankly modernist assumption of originality and individual authorship, but also with an eye to reinstating some of the traditional pre-20th Century practices in painting. However, I don't regard the meaning of the works as self-evident and so theory, drawn mainly from discourse analysis, philosophy, semiotics and art history, will be assembled to help account for the more difficult features of my project, especially those relating to abstraction as a communicative mode.
In Coastal Architecture the idea of an ‘organic architecture’ that has evolved through modernism is complemented with its mirror, an ‘architectural organic’, with each term given equal value, so that any functional purpose disappears from architecture and our scientific understanding of the organic world is treated as a catalyst to the imagination:
Art does not abrogate to itself the purposes of science; its negotiations
with the natural world are intuitive and imaginative…The intuitive and
imaginative interactions with nature that characterise art in the modern
period constitute after all something more than either a mirroring or a
refraction of the actual (although both representational and abstract art
claim these reflective and prismatic functions)…Our apprehension of
the world is relative and dynamic: as we change, everything else
changes; as we move through space, light and time, every relation
25 shifts. No picture can ever capture this complex actuality. (Gooding,
2002: 9, 10, 12)
Gooding identifies, in the work of such artists such as herman de vries, Chris
Drury, Nikolaus Lang, Richard Long and Giuseppe Penone an extended notion of landscape in contemporary art, not so much a cohesive movement as a tendency of artists to move away ‘from representing aspects of the visible world to the presentation of objects from the material world, of reports of experience and of traces and documentations of events in which the artist has in some way been purposively involved’. (Gooding, 2000: 20)
Conceptually, such an ‘extended notion of landscape’ would seem to be in accord with a general trend since the 1960s of dissolving the boundaries between art and life, but this tendency will no more serve my purpose than the recent vogue for the so-called contemporary sublime and the evocation of wilderness in landscape painting. In fact, in place of Gooding's
'presentation', and the sublime and wilderness, I would want my painting to reinstate a form of realism as its overall aim and, as a general theme, to propose a view of our relationship with nature based on habitat, using its advanced cultural form, architecture, as a kind of metaphorical armature for the structural aspects of the work.
Robert Rosenblum's 1975 study of landscape painting, from the northern
European transcendentalist tradition through to American Abstract
Expressionism, has not been matched, as far as I'm aware, by any
26 comparable study of landscape painting based on empirical observation, beginning with say J.M.W. Turner's topographic work, John Constable, Jean-
Baptiste Corot, Impressionism and through 20th Century abstraction via the lineage of most importance to my practice: Henri Matisse, Willem de Kooning,
Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Joan Mitchell, Maria da Silva, Richard
Diebenkorn, John Passmore, Fred Williams and contemporary painters such as Sean Scully, Per Kirkeby and Brendan Stewart Burns. The work of these painters is mostly without metaphysical pretensions as it negotiates perceptual experience through a dialectic of figuration and abstraction. I want to place Coastal Architecture within this empirical tradition.
The title, Coastal Architecture, suggests that the project is concerned with marrying the natural environment to different cultural practices, such as architecture, engineering and building. 'Architecture' is used here in a broad sense to encompass a range of cultural and natural structures and structure- making and to allow for an imaginative response and speculative play with the elements that I encounter daily, living on the coast next to the industrial harbour of Port Kembla. Insofar as the sources of the paintings are mostly drawn from this short stretch of coast and aim to reflect aspects of it, the work is nominally landscape painting and, in fact, the contemporary forms of this traditional genre will comprise an important part of the discussion.
As part of this exploration, I will be asking several questions, already hinted at: the relation of visual to verbal metaphor, abstraction as transcending its conventional opposition to figuration, whether a painting can be descriptive
27 and abstract at the same time, how abstract paintings can incorporate body presence in non-literal ways and what new experiences and meanings can be brought to a genre that is frequently dismissed as outmoded or compromised.
The attempt to answer them will begin by outlining some of the relevant ideas in landscape theory, defining key terms and establishing my foundation in philosophical realism and its relation to phenomenology in Chapter 2. I will then make an assessment of some claims made in recent ideological critiques of landscape art and then argue for the need to replace a restrictive neo-Marxist approach with alternative perspectives, for example, environmental politics and the recently emerged discipline of environmental aesthetics (a new branch of philosophical aesthetics) in Chapter 3.
Chapter 4 looks at the postmodern transformation of landscape into an interventionist, presentational mode in the work of some exemplary artists, followed by a discussion of the significance of point of view as a strategy for renewaI. I argue that Pollock’s late works were a breakthrough in reconceptualising point of view, giving us a new way of thinking about landscape painting.
Chapter 5 concentrates more closely on the material and visual formations in the paintings, exploring the related ideas of realism and abstraction in visual representations of the world. I will try to establish a polysemous and fluid
‘language’ for the paintings in contrast to a coded semiotics.
28
Chapter 6 extends the discussion of point of view to focus more on the place of the artist’s body in relation to the different spaces of landscape and representation. The final section, Coastal Architecture, is an overview of specific works that exemplify the major thematic concerns of the project.
CHAPTER 2: LANDSCAPE THEORY
‘as a way of starting the conversation, I’d propose that, while landscape is fundamentally engaged with ideology, it is not itself an ideology’.
(Michael Gaudio in De Lue and Elkins, 2008: 89)
The following section makes use of the international seminar on landscape theory held in 2006 at the Burren College of Art, Ballyvaughan, Ireland, convened by art historian and theorist, James Elkins, as a springboard for
29 making some of the distinctions and definitions fundamental to this exegesis and for clarifying some of the issues around landscape theory that are relevant to the project.
In his opening remarks, Elkins noted that, despite the frequent use of ideological critique as a starting point in critical writings on landscape, ‘there seems to be a kind of opening now: a sense that it is possible to see beyond that reading, if not outside it’. (De Lue and Elkins, 2008: 8) This exegesis takes up the promise of escaping the ideological frame by arguing that it is possible to see both beyond and outside it.
The philosophical position that I’ve adopted in order to get outside the now orthodox approaches of ideological critique - found in neo-Marxist, feminist and post-colonial writing, deconstruction and phenomenology, is an unfashionable one. Being idiosyncratic, it doesn’t identify with any one existing approach, following instead the advice of both Searle and Bois, to draw on different theoretical ideas as needed. However, insofar as I have made foundational use of Searle’s writing, and have cited him frequently, this exegesis is aligned with his version of ontological and epistemological realism, and of language and consciousness. Searle's position forms the philosophical background to any references in this thesis to objectivity, truth, consciousness, perception, representation and conceptual and cultural relativity. The arguments that I rely on have been clearly articulated by
Searle and my contribution is to deploy them as a way of rethinking landscape and of resisting ontological and epistemological scepticism
30 regarding access to the external world, to argue that we can access the world afresh and not be forever recycling culturally mediated signs or
Derrida's 'traces of traces'.
The second major alignment with existing discourses is with environmentalism. Like Searle’s External Realism and Basic Facts distinction, however, it is not part of the explicit content of the paintings, but rather forms part of their foundational premises, philosophical and political. In that sense, they are not literally inscribed or prominent in the works exhibited. I believe these assumptions are implicit, firstly in the overall effect of the paintings as products of direct experience rather than second-order references to cultural or historic representations and, secondly, that their concern with beauty and nuance is a mark of love and respect for the environment, which I take as a prerequisite for an environmental politics. That these beliefs are foundational rather than explicit is a crucial distinction on which the entire body of work for
Coastal Architecture is built, as I will argue in more detail in the following chapter.
My aim in operating outside the frame of ideological critique is not motivated by political considerations, and it needs to be clearly stated that my position is not one of opposition to the claims of ideological critique. For example:
The Western landscape tradition centers on a subject-object relation
that can be described in terms of antithetical or opposed pairs: “me—it,”
self and other, viewer and viewed, spectator and spectacle. In this
31 tradition, the subject dominates imaginatively an expanse of actual or
represented landscape, seascape or cityscape. The relation I am
describing is a form of alienation, of “not belonging.”
(Alan Wallach in in De Lue and Elkins, 2008: 317)
Wallach’s observation refers us to the picturesque tradition which is an outmoded one aesthetically and untenable from an environmental perspective. Similarly I acknowledge the critiques of gender stereotyping in much landscape representation and discourse, for example in relation to the
Sublime and the Beautiful discussed by Paul Mattick. (Mattick, 2004: 46-73).
Likewise, the human history of places can be acknowledged; the coastal landscape behind this project is layered with Indigenous and colonial histories and with industrial and now largely white recreational usages, all co- existing within the same spaces of a natural environment. One’s relation to these aspects of a place may be ethical and political, social and imaginative or focused aesthetically on the natural without any incompatibility between them.
The problem for me lies not in the politics but in the tendency of much critical writing to regard the artwork and its production as ideologically pre- determined, leaving the artist trapped in cultural meanings and values, where nothing exists outside culturally constructed representations and from which, logically, there is no escape. If a realist is someone who wants to treat the world as he or she finds it, this is a stifling and totalising intellectual perspective to be trapped in. It has the seriously detrimental consequence of
32 rendering aesthetics irrelevant or at least subordinate to any political position the artist might be adopting towards landscape and it dictates that any innovations must be, in the first place, political in order to be effective.
Throughout the Burren College seminar, phenomenology was suggested as an alternative strategy to the ideological:
In part it’s been part of a very welcome need to think beyond the
category of the image or, rather, the “image-as-text.” Of wanting to
renew that more full-bodied realm of affect and perception that lies
outside, and is in excess of, the representational frame. But I suppose
one could also see the turn to phenomenology as a kind of symptom:
the result not just of being dissatisfied with the exaggerations of
discourse theory, but also perhaps of the need for a new kind of poetics
or even an ethics; one which might talk of the need for a greater
implication in the object-world, a need to look out at a space and have it
look back. (Jessica Dubow in De Lue and Elkins, 2008: 112-113)
Though this passage may not be an accurate presentation of phenomenology, it serves as a very clear statement of some of the key affirmatives in this exegesis: unmediated experience, a poetics as part of one’s responses and an ethical engagement with an objectively existing natural world of which one is also, biologically, a part.
33 Some of the confusion around landscape discourse can be dispelled with clear definitions. Malcolm Andrews usefully distinguishes between the key terms of nature, landscape and environment:
Nature is the entire system of things, with the aggregation of all their
powers, properties, processes and products—whatever follows natural
law and whatever happens spontaneously.
Landscape is the scope of nature, modified by culture, from some locus,
and in that sense landscape is local, located…Humans have both
natural and cultural environments; landscapes are typically hybrid.
An environment does not exist without some organism environed by the
world in which it copes…An environment is the current field of
significance for a living being. (Andrews, 1999: 193)
However, despite the clarity of these definitions, there are fundamental problems. If ‘nature’ is construed as an idea, then it is a representation, and consequently conceptually and culturally relative. Andrews doesn’t insist on its priority to and independence of representation, so it remains ambiguous and potentially very confusing. ‘Landscape’ is defined as both a natural and a cultural construct, again allowing for slippage. ‘Environment’ identifies a relationship of living-in and the dynamics of that relationship, and similarly oscillates between nature and culture. The problem is that it can be difficult to know whether someone using any of these terms so defined is referring to objectively existing facts, which are not relative, or to concepts, which are.
34 However helpful these definitions may be, they don’t distinguish between representations and things that are independent of representations. In
Searle’s terms:
One might put this point by saying that there are many language-
independent features, facts, states of affairs, etc.; but I have put the
point more generally in terms of “representations” because I want to
note that the world exists independently not only of language but also of
thought, perception, belief, etc. (Searle, 1995: 153)
In relation to the above definitions, two quite different but everyday senses of
‘landscape’ are often elided, one referring to the actual material world and the other to its representations, often leading to confusion and false arguments. In phenomenology, subjective representations are elided with the world of brute facts to form a ‘kind of a mutual entwinment’ (De Lue and
Elkins, 2008: 104) an idea that Searle rejects as the ‘phenomenological illusion’.
From the fact that our knowledge/conception/picture of reality is
constructed by human brains in human interactions, it does not follow
that the reality of which we have the knowledge/conception/picture is
constructed by human brains in human interactions. (Searle, 1995: 159)
As science constructs realities, so does art, and both set out to define
aspects of that intuitive self-awareness that is the essence of human
35 experience…The procedures of both science and art seek to separate
the figure of consciousness from the ground of unknowing nature.
Nature is as multiple as the eyes that see it (and no more so). Outside
the sum of relative perceptions nature is indeed unitary, but by definition
unknowable; and it cannot know itself. (Gooding, 2002: 10)
On a cursory reading these quotes, from a philosopher and an art historian, might appear compatible, but in fact Gooding’s reality is constructed in ‘the eyes that see it’ which have their separate versions of nature which itself cannot be known objectively. If there is any doubt as to the phenomenological nature of his account, Gooding follows up with:
We experience the cosmos as from its centre, and apart from that
experience it has no centre. (italics mine) Our apprehension of the
world is relative and dynamic: as we change, everything else changes;
as we move through space, light and time, every relation shifts. No
picture can ever capture this complex actuality. (Gooding, 2002: 12)
The ‘complex actuality’ is in perceptual experience, in consciousness, not in nature or the cosmos. By contrast, for Searle there is a clear distinction between knowledge and reality. Knowledge is not relative to the beholder but accessible according to objective truth conditions, at which science has been highly successful. Their implicit disagreement frames the discussion in
Chapter 3 of some recent critiques of landscape art by writers who, in different ways, share a perspectivalist view of reality, objectivity and truth that characterises most contemporary art theory. My view is that, taken as a
36 whole, such writing has a stifling effect on our ability to think of landscape in an affirmative, even idealistic way.
The articulation of the possibility of direct access to, or the unmediated experience of, nature or the physical world is made difficult by two prevailing contemporary beliefs: one in the relativity of truth (or the impossibility of epistemological objectivity) and the other belief in nature as a social construction. I have been arguing that such beliefs are mistaken, that reality
(the 'brute facts') exists prior to and independently of our conceptions or representations of it and that it can be experienced directly, as artists have always assumed, even though there may be wide disagreement over what it means and how it is to be represented.
I now need to make clearer the distinction between Searle’s philosophical realism, which I am adopting as a background or fundamental theory, and phenomenology, particularly Merleau-Ponty’s, because his seems to be the most influential and popular version among artists and contemporary art theory writers. Even though I am sympathetic to some of phenomenology’s objectives (see Jessica Dubow above) I subscribe to Searle’s view that it is seriously mistaken about the relation of consciousness to the world. In
Merleau-Ponty’s view the only possible reality is a phenomenological one experienced through the lived body in which the boundaries between subjectivity and objectivity break down. ‘The thing and the world exist only in so far as they are experienced by me or by subjects like me…’ (Merleau-
Ponty, 1976: 333)
37
At the same time as the body withdraws from the objective world, and
forms between the pure subject and the object a third genus of being
(italics mine), the subject loses its purity and its transparency. Objects
stand before me and throw onto my retina a certain projection of
themselves, and I perceive them. There can no longer be any question
of isolating, in my physiological representation of the phenomenon, the
retinal images and their cerebral counter-part from the total field, actual
and possible, in which they appear. ((Merleau-Ponty, 1976: 350)
Attractive as Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on the body’s emplacement in the field of consciousness may be, his ‘third genus of being’, proposed to resolve the mystery of world-to-body-to-consciousness, is a fiction as it makes an ontological reduction instead of seeing the connection between mind and body as a causal one. According to Searle: ‘It seems mysterious because we do not know how the system of neurophysiology/consciousness works, and an adequate knowledge of how it works would remove the mystery’. (Searle,
1992: 102)
It is important to understand that Searle’s view is not a claim about the nature of reality, not about what it in fact exists, but simply that there is a reality independent of human representations of it. His argument asserts an external reality that is logically prior to any representations. And what representations represent Searle terms the basic facts. Searle makes no claims to describe the material nature of the basic facts. They are just the
38 way things have turned out, and science is the most successful mode we have of knowing them.
Where brute, observer independent facts are concerned, there is no
point of view built into their ontology. The basic facts exist apart
from any stance or point of view…Brute facts simply exist. No point
of view is necessary. Institutional facts exist from a point of view of
the participants in the institution and their participation in the
institution creates the facts. (Searle, 2005: 330-331)
Searle’s argument is not a worldview but a critique of the forms of scepticism that doubt that we can ever know the world objectively and, in its more extreme idealist version, that we can never know anything outside our own subjectivity.
It also needs to made clear that Searle’s External Realism ‘does not imply that there is a privileged vocabulary for describing’ the world because it is
‘not a theory of truth, it is not a theory of knowledge, and it is not a theory of language’. (Searle, 1995: 155). Adopting it as a foundational theory is important to my project for two quite different reasons:
1. It allows me the possibility of escaping from post-modern scepticism (from
Derrida's il n'y a pas de hors-texte) with regard to finding original ways of representing the world because an implication of Searle’s theory is that
39 reality is not always already spoken for by culture but exists independently of consciousness and language, which is culturally relative.
2. Tying the environment ontologically to a cultural perspective is to deny it the autonomy that would necessitate our unconditional moral respect and obligations to it. A position of cultural relativity will always weaken this obligation. Searle's argument that the existence of an external reality is a precondition of public communication allows for this basic autonomy, even though our representations of nature, environment etc. will be always from some sort of cultural perspective.
Any representation of anything is always from a certain point of
view. So, for example, if I represent something as water, I represent
it at a different level than if I represent it as H2O molecules. Same
stuff, different levels of description…From the fact that all
representation is from a point of view, from a certain stance, it does
not follow that the stance, the point of view, etc. is part of the reality
represented. (Searle, 2005: 333)
Though I would claim the right to objectivity, it would not be anything like the objectivity of science. Insofar as my work is a descriptive account at all, it is descriptive of a reality (nature, landscape, environment etc.) that is independent of our representations of it. As descriptions, the paintings are not paintings of my experience of this reality, but of the reality itself. However, self-contradictory as this may appear, they also take account of the
40 experiential encounter. This has more to do with how a place is understood, which includes sensory and affective modes, and is not at all about self- expression. The paintings necessarily have subjectivity ‘built in’ as they are made from a point of view, but they are not about that point of view or circumscribed by it, any more than science is circumscribed by being done by individual scientists or its results tied to their individual points of view.
What is at stake here is a notion of the truth as not relative to the observer, and that it is the communication of truth that is important, not self-expression.
In Searle’s theory, what we have access to is not external reality (because
ER serves as a logical precondition), but to the brute facts:
It could not be the case, as some antirealists have maintained, that all
facts are institutional facts, that there are no brute facts, because the
analysis of the structure of institutional facts reveals that they are
logically dependent on brute facts. To suppose that all facts are
institutional would produce an infinite regress or circularity in the
account of institutional facts. (Searle, 1995: 56)
The brute facts of the landscape are what we directly experience and perceive, even as we represent them to ourselves within conceptual systems, including the aesthetic systems of landscape painting.
41 CHAPTER 3: IDEOLOGY AND LANDSCAPE
CULTURAL CONSTRUCTIONS
In the catalogue essay for Wilderness: Balnaves Contemporary Painting exhibited at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2010, exhibition curator
Wayne Tunnicliffe observes that:
In Fred Williams's paintings the bush is abstracted to the point of
disappearing, with his vertical dashes of paint on the flat picture plane
marking in some ways the endpoint of traditional landscape art, erased
through the essentialism of formalist modernity. (Tunnicliffe, 2010: 11)
Tunnicliffe attempts to bring post-war Australian landscape painting into the wider post-structuralist critiques of painting's supposed endgame in the
1970s, framed by Clement Greenberg's formalism. To a painter like myself, for whom Williams was a revelation when I was starting out and a constant inspiration since, this passage is highly provocative. It is also wrong on several counts. Tunnicliffe suggests that the landscape subject all but disappears in Williams, presumably pointing the way towards empty minimalist canvases, that Williams subscribed to a formalist essentialism and that the ‘essentialism of formalist modernity’ was the common fate of
Australian landscape painting. The first claim is hard to reconcile with, for example, Ian Burn’s observation that Williams’ paintings taught us how to see a certain type of Australian landscape, that travelling through it we tend
42 to see the landscape in terms of his paintings. The second with the evidence of Williams' late paintings which were anything but minimalist; that period belongs to a relatively short period, from the early 1960s to the early 1970s.
The third makes no sense at all in implying that no ‘traditional’ landscape painting has been made after Williams. Tunnicliffe seems to be trying to establish a privileged historical space for the artists under his curatorship that would see their work as a renewal or rebirth of what had been erased by
‘formalist modernity’. Agreeing with W.J.T. Mitchell that 'landscape is an exhausted medium, no longer viable as a mode of artistic expression',
Tunnicliffe argues that:
through the rigours of postmodernism's examination of art history and
ideology, there has been an imaginative reengagement with the land
and wild nature as subject matter (and) despite its title, Wilderness is
not an exhibition about the landscape or tracts of 'unspoilt' land.
Exploring a richer and more nuanced engagement with ideas of the wild
and nature, Wilderness focuses on contemporary representational
painting that considers how the natural world exists as much in our
minds, memories and imaginations as it does in any empirical fact.
(Tunnicliffe, 2010: 13)
What concerns me most are not the paintings in the exhibition, though they seem minor compared to the work of the 'traditional' landscape artists being laid to rest, but that the whole discourse of landscape painting is being annexed to postmodern theories of ideology and cultural construction where it becomes unavailable to artists who don't share those theoretical positions.
43 Tunnicliffe dismisses landscape painting and then wants it back on his own terms. Because his positioning is influential and excluding, I will have to address some of the assumptions of his essay, however briefly.
Tunnicliffe opposes subjectivity to 'empirical fact', but subjectivity can't be a distinguishing feature of the work in the exhibition because all painting necessarily has it. There is nothing in the quote above that would not equally apply to Arthur Boyd, Albert Tucker or Sydney Nolan, for example. Instead, I would argue, the works exhibited are a continuation of a trend of image recycling and appropriation, of the ‘second-degree', familiar since the 1980s and seen in such exhibitions as “POPISM”, curated by Paul Taylor at the
National Gallery of Victoria in 1982 and in Annette Bezor's feminist take on the landscape in, for example, The Snake is Dead of 1981 or Paradise
Confined of 1984. Fantasy narratives and popular media underwrite the
Wilderness paintings as much as these earlier works. While nominally about
‘wilderness’, but not deriving from direct observation of the non-human environment, the paintings in Wilderness could just as well be described as fantasies involving nature imagery. But that doesn't make them landscapes, except in the detached world of postmodern artifice.
In a 2006 interview, Robert Rosenblum, author of the influential Modern
Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko, commented that the tradition of 'total faith in things spiritual or religious' gave way in 1960s to irony and quotation, that artists such as Rothko and
Newman were ‘a last gasp of some kind of naïve fantasy that works of art
44 have this kind of power’. And when asked if there were individual artists who continued in this tradition, he replied: ‘ - I'm sure there are. There are mystical artists but they are isolated. They don't really form a group. They're like crazy individuals. (Abstraction, 2007: 242) In an earlier 1988 interview he had already made his pessimism clear:
I honestly think that most high-minded ideals about art and morality, art
and society, art and Utopia have been almost completely dashed. A
stake has been driven through the heart of all optimistic beliefs in art as
a goal for purification and change…I think there are precious few artists
of any real interest today who claim for art some kind of spiritual and
moral force in the modern world.
Rosenblum then goes on to allow some notable exceptions: James Turrell,
Richard Long, Andy Goldsworthy, Wolfgang Laib are examples of ‘some kind of ecological last gasp of communion with some pure beautiful stuff of nature.
I guess this attitude is expiring though it may, as in the case of Richard Long, still produce some marvellous artists.’ (Papadakis,1988)
In his 1994 essay, ‘Imperial Landscape’, W.J.T. Mitchell takes issue with
Kenneth Clark’s idealism in his Landscape into Art of 1949. It is Clark’s notion of culture in harmony with the landscape that Mitchell sees ‘as a compensation for and screening off of the actual violence perpetrated there’.
(Mitchell, 1994: 7). Landscape for Mitchell cannot be seen as separate from its role as a site for the historical events, whether domestic or imperialist, that
45 have occurred in it. In order to annexe landscape exclusively to an ideological perspective, Mitchell executes a series of sleights-of-hand by firstly declaring that ‘landscape is not a genre of art but a medium’, then ‘a medium of exchange between the human and the natural, the self and the other’, noting that ‘Landscape is an exhausted medium, no longer viable as a mode of artistic expression’. (Mitchell, 1994: 5) But Mitchell’s slide from genre to two different senses of medium traps landscape in a neo-Marxist commodity critique through an illegitimate redefinition of landscape that suits his purpose of shifting landscape out of nature (as brute fact) and firmly into culture where it can be critiqued like any other artefact. Mitchell attempts to make 18th and 19th Century landscapes’ arguable complicity in oppression inseparable from the meaning of the landscape genre itself, forever compromising it as an art form, when he asks: ‘Is it possible that landscape, understood as the historical “invention” of a new visual/pictorial medium, is integrally connected with imperialism?’ (Mitchell, 1994: 9) The implication of this rhetorical question is that imperialism is to be seen as part of the ontology of landscape painting, instead of the more justifiable claim of its historical complicity. However, if imperialism had never existed the trajectory of landscape painting in the 19th Century, at least in Europe, would have been much the same, since its rise seems more connected to modernity and the nascent natural sciences than to colonialism. That landscape may have accompanied and abetted imperialism does not make imperialism integral to it.
46 The sophistic nature of Mitchell’s thesis is apparent even in the first sentence of his introduction in which landscape is proposed as a verb instead of a noun because it is ‘a process by which social and subjective identities are formed’. (Mitchell, 1994: 1) Mitchell also conflates the landscape of geographical place with its representations in tourism promotion and real estate for rhetorical purposes. His most bewildering claim is that landscape painting is ‘a representation of something that is already a representation in its own right’. Landscape is already encoded with cultural meaning and values; ‘landscape is already artifice’. (Mitchell, 1994: 14) Logically, this claim leads straight to an infinite regress because the world can only be artifice as a cultural construct or representation. And something has to exist independently and prior in order to be represented as such in the first place.
Searle puts it as follows: ‘…there is a distinction between those features that we might call intrinsic to nature and those features that exist relative to the intentionality of observers, users etc.’ (Searle, 1995: 9). Mitchell fails to make this crucial distinction between intrinsic features and ‘observer relative’ features that manifest in different types of representation as cultural constructions or artifice. Mitchell takes the plurality of meanings around
‘landscape’ and conflates them. For example, property does have exchange value; however, property isn’t landscape but a part of the world that has been parcelled up and owned. Paintings of property, such as John Berger’s famous example of Gainsborough’s painting, Mr and Mrs Andrews, is not a landscape at all, but a portrait in a picturesque setting which also happens to be property. Mitchell’s thesis does not demonstrate that landscape is
‘integrally connected to imperialism’.
47
According to art historian Ian McLean:
The presence of nature in contemporary art is not always self-evident.
Even when its subject is nature, the primary interest of most
contemporary artists is the cultural codes of representation. (McLean,
2002: 1).
I will focus on McLean’s treatment (or mistreatment) of Australian landscape artist John Wolseley who has, according to McLean, ‘a highly developed ecological consciousness that sought to aesthetically subvert the anthropocentric values of Western civilisation, and a commitment to working far from metropolitan centres’. (McLean, 2002: 2) While appreciating
Wolseley’s approach and nuanced grasp of wilderness, McLean can still make the judgement that:
Wolseley’s paintings are directly descended from (the) imperial age of
exploration. As if an explorer seeing the country for the first time, he
draws the flora and fauna, and surveys, maps and documents his
journey through the country. In dissecting the country, he prepares the
country for both settlement and for preservation as a wilderness park.
(McLean, 2002: 7)
In this narrative, Wolseley is cast as a revenant from the 19th Century. This is a judgement that must apply to anyone who in any way does anything that
48 resembles colonial explorer behaviour. But, of course, the resemblances don’t entail any such connections and we might ask what is gained for environmentalism by embarrassing Wolseley in such an imperious way.
Wolseley has a long and public record of environmental activism. His activism and his art are separate (he eschews didactic art) but related. He is a contemporary, not a colonial, artist. These facts seem obvious, but not to
McLean, who isn’t interested in Wolseley’s art except insofar as it illustrates his thesis that:
The ecological turn might seem to turn against the anthropocentric
conventions of Enlightenment’s progeny, capitalism and modernity, but
in fact it reinforces (through a repetition) the overall project. Wilderness
always was and still is a site from which modernity imagines the origins
of its discourses of freedom and redemption. (McLean, 2002: 9).
McLean is highly inconsistent on this point when he cites Slavoj Zizek, seemingly in agreement, that ecology is the ‘exemplary case’ of political practice that transcends Capital. McLean’s objective is puzzling. He acknowledges ‘the return to nature that has characterised a considerable part of contemporary art practice’ only to discredit it as the modernist desire for ‘renewal and redemption’. But to take eco-centric, public and political art practices and represent them as an egocentric renewal of subjectivity is an unjustifiable move that attempts to shut down landscape painting as a culturally valuable practice. McLean’s critique is based largely on the similarities he discerns between the journeys of early exploration and
49 Wolseley’s and the central role that journals play in both. While these similarities may be interesting, similarity is not identity and it leads McLean into a deeply unjust assessment of Wolseley whose activism, sensitivity to nature, close regard for the details of flora and fauna and awareness of indigenous culture should all argue in favour of a politics that is deeply anti- imperialistic, eco-centred and for someone whose 21st Century idealism indeed looks neo-Romantic in the face of by now orthodox postmodern pessimism, but someone who might be seen with more justification as an exemplary model for contemporary artists.
All the sub-genres of western landscape painting were developed and established in Britain and Europe independently of, or prior to, specifically colonial landscape painting. In other words, colonial artists represented the
New World in terms of already established landscape painting or graphic conventions (topographic, botanic, picturesque or sublime). It is simply erroneous, or worse sophistic, to present the landscape genre as a whole
(as Mitchell and McLean seem to) as inseparable from colonialism or imperialism. If anything, colonialism appears more wedded to early modern art in such defining moments as Picasso’s use of African ritual masks, or earlier, Gaugin’s use of South Sea islander carvings and ornament.
Given that the state of the environment now figures at all levels of politics globally, it is surprising that landscape representations are not central to contemporary visual arts or at least considered culturally relevant. The three influential critics discussed above have all explicitly pronounced landscape
50 painting to be an exhausted or dead genre and I think this is largely because they all conflate the art with the politics instead of seeing, as does Wolseley for example, that the politics is part of the background of assumptions and motives and is part of the foundation, not the superstructure, implicit rather than overt, invisible but also obvious in the whole drift of the artwork. And this failure to look at the art in and for itself, as opposed to seeing it as a vehicle for ideology, is a very frustrating aspect of recent writing that is always protected by its moral and political pieties. In place of such strictures, I would prefer to offer more affirmative and open interpretations.
ENVIRONMENTALISM
It would be puzzling if painters in the Western tradition today could paint the natural environment without also evincing a love of nature and a commitment to environmental politics in some form or degree. This is not a logical connection, nor does it dictate the kind of work to be done by artists, but I think it would be a fairly safe assumption to make about them. If environmentalism forms a de facto backdrop to contemporary landscape painting, then environmental aesthetics underwrites and provides a relevant and philosophically rigorous theoretical foundation for it. In a post-colonial era, environmentalism, not imperialism, provides the ideological foundation for landscape painting.
I will turn to considering how ecology not only provides us with a contemporary and expanded view of landscape-as-natural-system, but also
51 suggests an aesthetic model and provides a basis for our thinking about our ethical relations with nature.
In general, if we can bring ourselves fully to admit the independence of
nature, the fact that things go on in their own complex ways, we are
likely to feel more respect for the ways in which they go on. We are
prepared to contemplate them with admiration, to enjoy them
sensuously, to study them in their complexity as distinct from looking for
simple methods of manipulating them. The suggestion that we cannot
do this, that, inevitably, so long as we think of nature as ‘strange’, we
cannot, as Hegel thought, take any interest in it or feel any concern for it
underestimates the degree to which we can overcome egoism and
achieve disinterestedness. The emergence of new moral attitudes to
nature is bound up, then, with the emergence of a more realistic
philosophy of nature. That is the only adequate foundation for effective
ecological concern. (Passmore, 1995: 141)
Allen Carlson, in recent overview of the relatively new field of Environmental
Aesthetics (Carlson, 2009), notes the seminal importance of Ronald
Hepburn’s 1966 essay: ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural
Beauty’ that sets out many of the current concerns of this branch of aesthetics. Unlike John Passmore above, Hepburn rejected Kant’s insistence on the disinterestedness of aesthetic contemplation as leading to an overly formalist and narrow approach to the growing environmental complexity and
52 concerns of the late 20th Century. Following Hepburn, Arnold Berleant (1992) proposed an ‘aesthetics of engagement’ as a paradigm for all situations, that
‘advocates transcending traditional dichotomies, such as subject/object, and diminishing the distance between the appreciator and the appreciated, aiming at a total multi-sensory immersion of the former within the latter, be it nature or art’. (Carlson, 2009: 428)
Although I see my painting belonging within the landscape genre and tradition of abstract painting, I will be arguing that it is closer to the environmental imperatives of contemporary culture than to the vitalist expressionism of much modern abstract landscape painting. This is because
I am more interested in our responsible interactions with the landscape, and in both invention and accurate depiction, all of which implicitly convey both a feeling for the landscape (a sensitivity to its particularities) and positive feelings towards landscape. I want to distance my work from the modernist tradition of self-expression and align it with the long tradition of imaginative observation that we find in Turner, Constable and the Australian artists Arthur
Streeton, John Passmore and Fred Williams, to name a few key influences.
Post-war Western landscape painting in Australia has tended to depict the environment as wilderness, usually a place of suffering or failure or more latterly since the 1970s (for example, since the Franklin River campaign), as a place of degradation or exploitation. A pervasively elegiac mood was very noticeable in a group of prints on environmental themes from the Print
53 Council of Australia collection that I included in a group exhibition in the FCA
Gallery in 2010. I noted in my opening talk that:
Back and front we have prints made for the 2009 South Coast
Indigenous Palanjang/Saltwater exhibition at the Wollongong City
Gallery and, along this wall, work on environmental themes from the
Print Council of Australia collection dating back to the 1970s. It's hard
not to be struck by the affirmative mood of most of the Palanjang prints
compared to the sombre tone of the PCA collection. However, it's not
surprising that death, despoliation, urban decay and a mood of
mourning are present in many of these non-indigenous prints and it
would make an interesting survey to measure the extent to which this
kind of pessimistic imagery runs through contemporary Western
landscape art. Both environmentalism and indigenous Australian art
have redefined the landscape genre in Australia since the 1970s, so
seeing this work together might prompt us to reflect on our current
connections to land and landscape.
54
Fig 3.1: Anne McMaster, Kangaroo Bones, Broken Crockery, Drought, 2008, Etching.
55
Fig 3.2: Christine Willcocks, Birdwood, 2008, solar plate etching
I suspect that the mournful tone of the environmentally themed prints from the PCA collection was the result of an ideological imperative to make the politics overt rather than implicit. There is a depressing conformity in this attitude and in advocating a foundational role for environmentalism in contemporary landscape painting I am certainly not proposing that it take the form of a program. That would constrict it as much as any other ideological imperative, giving painting the task of once again illustrating the text. But if the politics is not overt, how does it appear in the painting at all?
56
Instead of trying to find obvious correspondences, I would consider instead the underlying values of environmentalism, and how these manifest in subjectivity. A possible model for landscape painting is available in Alan
Carlson’s theory of an aesthetics of nature:
Our appreciation of nature is aesthetic and is analogous to that of art in
both its nature and its structure. The significant difference is that while
in art appreciation…the knowledge given by art criticism and art history
are relevant, in nature appreciation…the knowledge is that provided by
natural history - by science. But this difference is not unexpected;
nature is not art. (Carlson, 2009: 50)
Lawrence Buell notes that environmentalism, or eco-centricity, in nature writing is characterised by a strong turn to ‘facticity’, to modes of writing that are descriptive and based on encounters with a real world even though
‘literary theory has been making the idea of a literature devoted to recuperating the factical environment seem quaintly untheoretical’. (Buell,
1995: 86). He concludes that:
the ethos - betrayed though it may eventually be - of basing art on
disciplined extrospection is in the first instance an affirmation of
environment over self, over appropriative homocentric desire. (Buell,
1995: 104).
57 I would argue that any sustained effort to faithfully describe the external world can itself be regarded as a mark of eco-centrism, and the prerequisite for a personal environmental politics if it attempts to represent nature in and for itself and not from any instrumental viewpoint. I believe we see this descriptive fidelity to nature in an exemplary way in the work of John
Wolseley.
LANDSCAPE GENRE
So far I have assumed the landscape genre as a given, but in fact the relationship of any of my paintings to this genre, as we are familiar with it in art history, is not obvious. It is not a simple categorisation because both the nature of the works in question and the genre itself are not self-evident, nor has art history dealt comprehensively with the evolution in landscape painting since at least Pollock’s revolutionary drip paintings of the late 1940s. It may even turn out that the idea of the genre no longer identifies anything of value for us, as it once identified a place as scenic or picturesque or sublime.
However, I’m reluctant to give up the category of landscape for several reasons. Firstly, without some connection to the external world, abstraction risks becoming merely a formal aesthetic exercise, a common enough criticism of it. Secondly, every painting in this project has had its genesis in my encounters with the landscape and my reflections on it, even though the final form may have evolved well beyond its origin in the landscape. Thirdly, it seems that the notion of landscape genre itself has to be continually renovated to accommodate developments in art practice as well as the
58 changing attitudes and values we adopt towards the environment, built or natural, and that any work motivated by the environment may well be positioned through self-definition. Lastly, it could be argued that the genre reflects the importance we attach to, and the state of our interest in, the natural world, and that giving it up might signify the abdication of a critical, not to mention political, position on the state of the natural world and its relation to the cultural.
There is a powerful western intellectual and artistic tradition based in empirical realism that, even though its parts are scattered throughout various academic disciplines and across different histories, could well serve to underpin a contemporary landscape practice that takes environmentalism as its moral perspective. Such a lineage, even starting as late as the early 19th
Century would include nature writing (fiction and non-fiction), aesthetics, naturphilosophie, the new field of environmental aesthetics in Anglo-
American philosophy and an unbroken landscape painting tradition down to the present. A parallel history to that traced by Robert Rosenblum - of the transcendental themes in Northern European Romanticism down to mid-20th
Century abstraction - can be made by tracing an unbroken empirical-realist line from Western Romantic landscape painting down to contemporary practitioners such as the Norwegian Per Kirkeby and the Welshman,
Brendan Stuart Burns. This is the tradition I would wish to align with and continue. ‘Empirical realism’ in this context also refers broadly to a philosophical epistemological position which rejects dualism, idealism and phenomenology but at the same time acknowledges that the neo-Romantic
59 and transcendental impulses of individual artists don’t undermine its fundamentally realist outlook.
There are now so many different academic disciplines embracing aspects of the environment, all with their own definitions of landscape buried in the terminology of nature, ecology, environment, land, territory, terrain, country, place, habitat, domain, and so forth that the meaning of landscape will need to be specified in each case. In fact, my view is that landscape, as a representation, and hence a conceptually relative formation, is invented anew in every instance of it, regardless of the medium. Which is not to imply that anything goes. Rauschenberg's famous telegram of 1961: ‘This is a portrait of Iris Clert, if I say so’ may be provocative and entertaining, but if we accept his telegram as a portrait then, in principle, anything can be, and if anything can be a portrait we will still need a word to distinguish representations of individual people from things that aren’t. As for portraits, so for landscapes, and 'landscape', whatever else it means, must include representations of such things as sky, land, sea etc., otherwise we will need to find a new word for these types of images. British art historian, Charles
Harrison, offers this ‘axiomatic framework’:
1. That they are “landscapes” insofar as they refer to landscape motifs
and insofar as they establish their distinctive effects in part through an
illusion of relatively deep space, but that they are nevertheless also
invested with a latent content of a different order;
60 2. That this content is unaccountable for by simple reference either to
the naturalistic motif or to the system of illusion by which that motif is
represented; it is function of what the painting does, not just of how it
appears;
3. That it is nevertheless a necessary condition for disclosure of this
content that the spectator of the painting be able to adopt the
imaginary position of the viewer of the represented scene, as that
position is constructed by the composition of the painting; and
4. That the adoption of this position and the disclosing of this content are
necessary conditions of a defensible interpretation.
(Harrison, 1994: 226)
Harrison’s defining conditions seem to be largely from the perspective of critical reception, with the artist’s intentions absent. If Harrison is insisting on a metaphorical function for landscape painting, I would agree, as without it there is only a literal and banal transcription, however technically accomplished it might be. However, his framework seems to assume the kind of figurative painting found in his 19th Century examples, and this becomes immediately problematic if we try to apply it to abstraction. For example, if no motif is identifiable and unbounded space contracts to the surface plane, then there is a serious violation of Harrison’s conditions, even though we might still want to call such painting landscape. Furthermore, I will be arguing that it is exactly ‘the imaginary position of the viewer of the represented scene’ that is made problematic in abstract painting and that this constitutes
61 one of the major breaks of 20th Century landscape painting from its traditional forms.
CHAPTER 4: ORIENTATIONS
INTERVENTIONS
Post-1960s Australian landscape painting’s history as a progressive art form foundered with the emergence of postcolonial and feminist politics and
62 Indigenous painting, all major cultural forces that called into question earlier gendered, nationalistic and ethnocentric approaches to the Australian landscape. In response to politico-cultural forces internationally, Western landscape painting was transformed into ‘an expanded field’, into the conceptual modes of earth works, performance art and environmental art. In
Mel Gooding’s words, ‘the essential move… is from representing aspects of the visible world to the presentation of objects from the material world’ through the various strategies of intervening, collecting, arranging, collaborating and documenting the process and the often transient outcomes of these actions. (Gooding, 2002: 20)
The various forms of intervention in the work of Giuseppe Penone, Steve
Tobin and Andy Goldsworthy, discussed in this section, all assume that nature is directly accessible, that its material can be worked, transformed and reconstituted as a cultural idea. Their physical interventions escape from the representational conventions and accumulated historical ideology of painting.
Intervention, presentation and documentation constitute an alternative to the pictorial tradition, allowing for a fresh start and a new perspective on nature that derives its urgency from environmentalism. The value of these artists, among others, for my project is for their forging of opportunities for new ways of conceiving landscape as a powerful subject. Landscape painting has to respond to the challenge of such innovations if it is to break from the modernist habits of reductive formalism and expressionism and from earlier picturesque conventions and clichés. For example, in the following work by
Penone, aesthetic detachment quite literally disappears. Nature both speaks
63 for itself and through the artist as a medium in which his ego is subsumed to nature, or identified with it or engaged as a partner in a physical process:
Fig 4.1: Guiseppe Penone, Continuera a crescere tranne che in quel punto, 1968, bronze.
The tree, once it has lost or consumed every trace of emotional, formal
and cultural significance, appears as a vital expanding element,
proliferating and growing continuously. To its energy, another energy is
attached - mine. Its reaction is the work. (Penone, quoted in Gooding,
2002: 151)
Sculptors can work in a physical, direct way with the materiality of their subject, unlike painters: '- one material within one kind of time, that was the
64 tree, and another material with a different timescale, my body, my person', observed Penone of this work. (Gooding, 2002: 150) This takes us to a comparable work by the American sculptor, Steve Tobin:
Fig 4.2: Steve Tobin, Untitled, 2002, cast bronze, 10 x 14 x 12 feet.
This object naturally belongs under the ground but has been displaced above it, in a reversal of its natural condition. Its vitality seems quite other to a human mode of existence, almost frightening. Whereas Penone's work is a presentation of a relation of the human to the non-human, Tobin's work is a representation of nature in the sense of re-presentation, presenting again in a new context, something that already existed. His work deals with chaos, disorder or rather 'streams of order' within disorder, 'across different scales of being'. (Kuspit, 2003: 17).
65 Tobin’s work shows more interest in the random or unpredictable controlling forces of nature than in any modernist respect for autonomous form or good gestalt. They are unconstrained, undisciplined, unframed, monumental in scale and effect and frozen in violent energy.
Fig 4.3:Andy Goldsworthy, Cherry leaves, Swindale Beck Wood, Cumbria,
November, 1984
Compared with Tobin’s dark, chthonic forms, Andy Goldsworthy’s in situ leaf installation (Fig 4.3) is gentle like most works by this artist. Goldsworthy always seems to want to bring out the inherent beauty of the fragment, concede its transience and then return it to its original state. He uses found materials but always constructs something new out them, usually elegant structures that reconfigure the natural material into something more like design or architecture. In other words, nature is made into a cultural artefact without addition and without losing any of its naturalness. In its formation and restoration to a natural state, much of his work seems to perform an ecological rite: using, revering or admiring and then putting it back in its place.
A similar though considerably later work is documented as follows:
66 22 November, 2002
Developed the idea of yesterday's work, using sticks instead of a stone.
I first laid down a pathway of bark, supported above the stream by
stones, and then placed several sticks end-to-end on top of the bark.
The joints between one stick and another were filled mud so that there
appeared to be a single line.
There were still enough yellow elm leaves to work around the sticks in a
gradation from dark to yellow. The glowing halo of colour gave the line a
sense of hovering over the stream. I liked the exchange of energy
between sticks and leaves, echoing what occurs within the living tree.
The leaves, bark and sticks were elm and whilst not intended as a
portrait of an elm tree, it has something of that about it. (Goldsworthy,
2004: 132)
'The exchange of energy' referred to is metaphorical and belongs to the experience of art, not science. Intervention for these artists is a movement from detached observation to physical engagement with all the senses: texture to the touch, damp, heavy, spiky, an endless catalogue of experiences within a circumscribed place or even around a single object. A phenomenological description of these works seems sensuously rich compared with what a painting can offer. However, painting’s mode of presentation is also sensuous, if indirectly so, because vision is a synesthetic system within consciousness, the expressive value of which modern painting
67 has always exploited. But the chief relevance of these artists for my project lies in their replacement of the view or the scene with a completely different kind of encounter in which nature itself holds the potential for meaning and is approached as something that already contains the art work, as a potentiality, that the artist has to reveal or bring about in acts of collaboration. For painting, then, vision has to shift from viewing to seeing into, through one thing to another, and from the physical to the symbolic and conceptual. The question of point of view immediately confronts this effort.
BODILY ORIENTATIONS
…the world of perception offers the painter two main focuses of
thematic form: body and space, both phenomena of the third
dimension brought into correlation with one another through central
perspective. Alberti's geometric measurement of space was just as
imperative to the stocktaking of the physical world as it was for the
understanding of depth as a dimension that the viewer could enter
virtually. However, this seemingly reliable orientation in the world
also contains confusing potentials. The physical world can be
made ambiguous on the one hand and, on the other, the enterable
space can turn into a chaos whose cosmic outreach denies us
entry. (Hofmann, 2007: 19)
68 Landscape painters habitually work with a specific bodily relation to making and to the subject and it has been, with few exceptions, static and distanced, conditioned by the picturesque conventions of landscape painting. The painter stands before the flat surface of the painting looking into its constructed spaces as one stands in front of a window looking through and out to its given spaces. Intervention, on the other hand, is a movement in time through the landscape, an immersion of all the senses in direct contact with an independent nature, favouring touch as much as sight.
There is a history of landscape painters trying to break out of the ‘prison’ of central perspective. Cezanne initiated the effort by exploring the dynamics of visual perception and, in the 20th Century, painters have done it by removing their bodies, literally or figuratively, from in front of the window and placing themselves in a new relation to both their subject and their medium. The painter most ambitious in this respect was Jackson Pollock, whose experiments with point of view were a highly original ‘technical’ move in a process of representing his physical and psychological immersion in nature.
In order to justify adding yet more words to the vast literature on Pollock, I will argue that his most radical post-1945 work has rarely been framed within landscape discourse, possibly because of its radical nature, compared with a perception of landscape’s marginality to painting’s mid-century trajectory, but that, nevertheless, Pollock’s paintings from this period continue his long-time interest in landscape and are, in fact, seen as most coherent and eloquent in terms of a framing landscape idea. Ellen Johnson argued persuasively for this in her 1973 essay, ‘Jackson Pollock and nature’. My chief aim here,
69 however, is not reclaim Pollock for the history of the landscape genre, though something like this is implied, but to discuss the notion of point of view in his paintings from this period and its value as a model for subsequent landscape painting.
In November 1945 Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock left their New York apartment and moved to a house with a barn in The Springs, East Hampton.
Pollock lived his life out here, dying in a car crash on Fireplace Rd in August
1956. From the back of the house, once they'd shifted the barn, they had a view over the marshes of Accobonac Ck to Gardiner's Bay beyond. Pollock soon grew to know intimately 'the dunes, the northwest woods and the beaches between East Hampton and Montauk’ (Landau: 2000, 159).
Through his few statements and the extreme daring of the paintings he made in response to his East Hampton environment, Pollock's example may open a view for us onto praxis in relation to nature. His best known statements are all consistent with a view of him as a modern landscape painter:
…I have a definite feeling for the West: the vast horizontality of the land,
for instance; here only the Atlantic Ocean gives you that.
The modern artist, it seems to me, is working and expressing an inner
world - in other words - expressing the energy, the motion, and other
inner forces.
70 …the modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his
feelings rather than illustrating.
- I don't use the accident - cause I deny the accident.
My concern is with the rhythms of nature…I work inside out, like nature.
You can hear the life in the grass, hear it growing…
The ocean's what the expanse of the West was for me.
I saw a landscape the likes of which no human being could have seen.
I am nature.
In Ed Harris’ 2000 film on Pollock this last assertion is given as a throwaway line by Pollock to Krasner in their apartment. However, according to Krasner it was a retort to the émigré painter and teacher Hans Hofmann who had chided Pollock on not working from nature. In the same meeting, in late 1942 or early 1943, Pollock apparently told Hofmann to put up or shut up. Pollock was clearly unimpressed or defensive about theory. But what allowed him to say with such confidence, 'I am nature'? And what could it have meant at that time in that place? It was said while he was still living in New York, before he moved to the countryside of East Hampton which, I would argue, makes it
71 more likely that he had in mind something other than wilderness or landscape.
There are several reasons for his not thinking about landscape in the early
1940s. He was anxious to assert his independence from his former teacher,
Thomas Hart Benton, and the Midwestern ruralist school of American painting, a narrative landscape tradition. Secondly, his experience of Carl
Jung's ideas of the unconscious provided him with a particularly powerful primitivist theory of human nature which could be directly imported into art making. In a 1927 essay, ‘The Structure of the Psyche’, Jung had written:
Theoretically it should be possible to ‘peel’ the collective unconscious,
layer by layer, until we come to the psychology of the worm, and even
of the amoeba.
The shared ‘psychic organs’ or archetypes of the collective unconscious, which lie at a deeper level than the individual or Freudian unconscious, are inherited by everyone. This theory was particularly attractive to the New York artists of the 1940s as it suggested that the collective unconscious, once accessed, would provide a universal visual language. Initially this language took the form of totemic symbols deployed across the picture surface.
Pollock’s remark ‘I am nature’ was made during this period. In Instinct and the Unconscious (1919), Jung had written that archetypes were engraved on the collective psyche as ‘forms without content’ and that the unconscious is built from a continuous layering of experiential deposits like a riverbed, each
72 a ‘residue of ancestral life’. In other contexts Jung referred to the collective unconscious as oceanic. In psychoanalysis, the contemporary individual had to be put in touch with his or her ‘primitive’ or ‘primeval’ self.
There were, then, plenty of ideas in the air at the time to enable Pollock to pursue this idea of self and, via the deeper levels of the unconscious that he had experienced under analysis, to convince him of his quite literal identity with the rest of nature, down to the level of the amoeba. However, to the New
York school artists in the 1940s, tapping into the unconscious meant excavating archetypes in the form of real or imaginary prehistoric or 'tribal' ideograms, not the organic forms of nature. It was not until Pollock moved to
The Springs that he began to respond to his immediate natural environment, but I would argue that when he did so it was through the Jungian conceptual framework of the collective unconscious.
In late 1946, after a year in The Springs, Pollock painted the Accobonac series which, relative to his earlier work, were relaxed, spacious paintings,
Matissean in colour and which dispensed with totem figures altogether.
73
Fig 4.4: Jackson Pollock, The Key (detail), 1946, oil on canvas, 59 x 84 ins.
This was followed by two series of paintings that, I believe, demonstrate an entirely new approach to landscape painting and make sense of Pollock's reported comment that he 'saw a landscape the likes of which no human being could have seen'. These are collectively known as Sounds in the Grass, to which Pollock gave individual titles such as The Blue Unconscious,
Something of the Past, Croaking Movement, Eyes in the Heat, Earth Worms and Shimmering Substance.
74
Fig 4.5: Jackson Pollock, Croaking Movement, c. 1946, oil on canvas, 53.5 x 43.25 ins.
75
Fig 4.6: Jackson Pollock, Eyes in the Heat, 1946, oil on canvas, 54 x 43 ins
In 1947 he showed new works at Betty Parsons Gallery in New York with the titles Galaxy, Lucifer, Full Fathom Five, Comet, Shooting Stars, and
Reflections of the Big Dipper. Pollock's neighbour, the writer Ralph
Mannheim, came up with the titles with Pollock's approval. (Landau: 2000,
169)
76
Fig 4.7: Jackson Pollock, Galaxy, 1947, Oil and aluminium paint on canvas, 43.5 x 34 ins.
I'm giving these titles some attention because they suggest how far he had shifted away from the totemic images to a new conception of landscape in which he worked 'inside out, like nature'. The Blue Unconscious and
Something of the Past carry strong suggestions of Jung's oceanic unconscious, but the other four seem to refer to a natural source, and close up, as though Pollock had orientated his body and field of vision to look outwards from inside the natural forms of his subject matter; had, in fact, identified himself physically with the grass, the frogs, worms and creatures
77 and elements beyond his studio. For Pollock to identify with the forms of nature didn't mean merely to impersonate them, to live inside their skin, but to achieve, via an imaginative evolutionary regression through the layers of the unconscious, as Jung had suggested, to a radically different point of view on the world: at ground level with the frog, looking up; underground with the worms; inside the grass, moving with it; in the currents of ocean; inside the heat of summer; in short, 'working inside out, like nature'.
In the 1947 exhibition the shift in viewing positions for both artist and spectator is more cosmic, moving from the bottom of the ocean in Full
Fathom Five to the surface of water in Reflection of the Big Dipper and to outer space in Galaxy and several other titles. Looking up and looking down are implied, but also looking outwards in a way that disperses or fragments the gaze across and into infinite space. The first shift, then, was one of viewpoint, from upright stance in front of a view to a mobile, fluid viewpoint, either imaginatively or literally within the subject, looking out.
On this account, the viewpoint is still relatively static, however, and while it might explain the form taken by the Sounds in the Grass series, it doesn't account for Pollock's need to invent the drip paintings and their all-over compositions. My argument is that they were an attempt to progress from the relatively fixed viewpoint of the Sounds in the Grass paintings, to a more dispersed, 'vaporised' merging with nature suggested by the 'cosmic' titles.
Pollock moved from the fixed position or viewpoint to one of identity and simultaneity, of being within all points of space at the same time, in other
78 words, taking all possible viewpoints, which is also none at all because he had moved from a physical, spatio-temporal mode of representing to a conceptual mode.
'A peculiarly psychotic yielding to the call of "space", comments Rosalind
Krauss, is a pathology of schizophrenics, described by the Surrealist Roger
Callois as follows:
The body then desolidifies with his thoughts, the individual breaks the
boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries
to look at himself from any point whatever of space. He feels himself
becoming space… He is alike, not like something, but simply like. And
he invents spaces of which he is 'the compulsive possession'. (Krauss,
1993: 155, 157)
79
Fig 4.8: Pollock Painting, 1950, Photograph by Rudolph Burckhardt.
Clearly no schizophrenic at work - Pollock's control of the medium, the painting space and his own body are very evident in the photos of him working. Turning, twisting, bending, leaning, kneeling, thrusting, throwing, circling, pausing, these are actions we still don't normally associate with painting. In order to be able to communicate what it was to be inside nature, to work 'inside out', however, Pollock had to be able to be inside the painting space, as far as it was practical, in order that the forces he was depicting with paint could occur in the most direct and convincing way. Pollock's shift of subject position in the Sound in the Grass series to that of the object, followed by the semiotic shift from the iconic sign to the indexical when he began pouring and throwing the paint onto the horizontal canvas, is clear
80 when comparing Eyes in the Heat with Galaxy above. Increasingly, this more performative mode of making corresponded in painting terms to the dispersal or ‘atomisation’ of his bodily point of view within nature. Of Pollock’s late, large canvases Ellen Johnson has noted:
There is no sky, no prescribed eye-level, no point of reference. The
lines in Pollock’s all-over paintings never stop swinging long enough to
delineate or imply shapes on a ground (as most previous paintings had
done); instead, they formed fields of coloured motion in space, without
foreground or background, without beginning or end – thus it is not only
the mural scale which induces in the viewer the sensation of being
totally surrounded by the painting, immersed in it as the artist himself
was in the act of painting it. (Johnson, 1973: 260)
Pollock’s so-called drip paintings are a representation of a conception of nature that is only partly a visible phenomenon. To locate a visual model for this we might look to maps, but these have spatial reference points that
Pollock’s paintings lack. Perhaps the nearest representational model is the diagram, a figure that can be purely schematic and abstract, that presents a process yet takes no physical point of view on its subject. The fact that
Pollock painted his works on the floor then hung them on the wall for viewing further reinforces this spatial open-ness or lack of fixity. As models for subsequent landscape painting, they demonstrate the consequences and possibilities available in avoiding a fixed viewpoint on the subject, suggesting other visual models for our use. And their open spatiality immerses the
81 viewer in the painting, removing our sense of separation from the subject that is such a powerful feature of central perspective. American artist Pat Steir:
has treated the Pollock drip technique as an "open sequence", in the
sense in which George Kubler uses the term in The Shape of Time -- a
developing sequence that was suspended in the past, perhaps under
the impression it had been completed, and that can be reopened in the
future through an act of will by an individual artist. (McEvilley, 1995: 61)
Fig 4.9: Pat Steir, September Evening Waterfall, 1991, oil on canvas, 289.6 x 261 cm. Per Kirkeby in his 1968 book, Picture Explanations, outlines a postmodern conception of point of view:
82 If you place yourself at the centre of a sphere and locate all your points
of reference on the outer shell, you avoid any hierarchical order; it is the
same distance between the central figure to any of the points on the
shell. You thus avoid the adoption of a ‘higher’ point of view that
precludes ‘lower’ but perhaps more ‘vital’ ones. (Steffensen: 2009, 141)
To Kirkeby, who trained as a geologist, the globe was probably an obvious model. And it is a very useful one because it can be interpreted as a three- dimensional model (Kirkeby placed himself inside it) or in its two-dimensional form as a projection. A globe in projection has natural affinities with the flat surface of a painting, whereas a map’s orientations are compass points.
Fig 4.10: Stick chart, Marshall Islands, no date, wood, fibre, shells,
58 cm high.
The shells stand for islands and bamboo sticks for currents and prevailing winds. In its structure and materials this chart, to a Western modernist mind, is a sensuous landscape, albeit sculptural in form and like a diagram it sits 83 between figuration and abstraction. It serves to remind us that for any representation we can occupy conceptual and imaginative positions inside it, even while we are physically outside it.
None of the foregoing is meant to imply that the body of the viewer undergoes the same spatial gymnastics as the artist’s body (or embodied imagination) in experiencing the world, in perception and in the representation of space and viewpoint. These are levels of production particular to an individual subjectivity. In viewing a painting, regardless of its content, our relation to it is physically and psychologically conditioned. For example, paintings are usually presented hanging at eye level, flat against the wall. We have in this a fair simulation of upright body facing mirror/window with the homeostatic features of above/below, right/left and a desire for symmetry on the horizontal axis but not usually on the vertical. Add to this our western habits of reading from left to right and the painting is constructed as mirror/window/text even as we take in its content and regardless of whether that content is figurative or abstract. Rohn elaborates on this in his Introduction to Visual Dynamics in Jackson Pollock’s
Abstractions:
…we perceive certain things as striving upwards or floating in space,
and we experience a progression that runs from the right to the left
across the visual field as action that flows against us. Centers, by
contrast, become particularly important visual anchors. Numerous
potential centers arise in a visual construct: the physical center of a
84 form; the gravitational center, which takes into account anisotropic
dynamics; and secondary centers arising from the interplay of
components within the visual field. (Rohn, 1987: 4)
I would prefer to accept these visual habits, or givens, and exploit their potential for visual dynamics rather than attempt to resist them, and it should be stressed that these conditions of viewing also belong to the artist in the act of painting, that these conditions are part of the feedback mechanisms of making a painting, responding and modifying in the fabricating of a visual representation, of its specific to-be-looked-at-ness. Pollock’s spatial innovations form an ‘open series’ that allow us great speculative freedom about our relation to the world, how we can orient ourselves to it and then invent new forms of visual representation which may have little resemblance to Pollock’s.
CHAPTER 5: FLUID SIGNIFIERS
ABSTRACTION
85
Fig 5.1: Richard Hook, Jetty, 2010, relief print on paper, 167 x 71 cm.
The chapter title conjures semiotics as a possible way of illuminating meaning in Coastal Architecture. In considering C. S. Peirce’s category of the indexical sign to characterise painting’s ‘language’, I had thought that the notion of the shifter outlined by Roman Jacobsen - for example,
86 demonstrative words such as 'this'' and 'that', whose meanings are contingent on specific spatial contexts - might also apply to a ‘grammar’ of painting in which the visual elements (signs) could perform more than one function at the same time. The idea of fluid signifiers is an attempt to account for ambiguities in my painting. These visual ambiguities may be spatial or morphological. For example, the black and white relief print Jetty (Fig 5.1) may be read on a macro-scale as a large engineering structure suspended in water across the tracts of a harbour, or it can be read on a human scale as a skeletal structure suggestive of a human spine and rib cage, flattened and extended, or even, in a similar way, as a micro-organism. Differences in scale, or levels of description, imply very different spatial worlds in the picture even though the figure’s shape is constant. The title orientates you to one scale of visual experience but doesn't exhaust the morphological possibilities.
Such a degree of suggestiveness is desirable as I’m interested in the interplay and exchanges of form, in our ability to see one thing in terms of another, of seeing in nature models for human design which encourage a constant process of reading into and out of the natural world so that any clear demarcation or boundary between mind and world seems to disappear as they become part of one dynamic system of feedback and exchange. While conceptually culture and nature are in exchange, at the perceptual level my work builds on a contrast or differentiation between two existential orders.
One is the ground, characterised by fluidity: of the organic, mobile, ephemeral, flowing, liquid or gaseous. The other is the figure: architectonic, structural, usually tensile and slender but occasionally suggestive of massive,
87 immovable, inert, stable and static materials that are subject to gravity.
These figure/ground elements aren't arrayed in a clear or fixed relationship, but slide about across the surface, moving above and below each other.
Painting is often referred to as a language, but if we try to press this analogy into service as an explanatory theory of communication we immediately run into difficulties because abstract painting has no code or rules of grammar or usage and can’t be easily analysed into the discrete elements of sentences, words and syllables. A visual semiotics such as Peirce’s triad of symbolic, iconic and indexical signs may possibly be applied to parts of images and help to clarify the relations between the representational and the conceptual in abstraction. As Margaret Iversen notes:
Peirce isolates two categories of the iconic sign, images and diagrams.
The diagram, unlike the image, does not resemble the ‘simple qualities’
of its objects but only the relations of its parts. (Rees and Borzello,1988:
90).
This is a useful way of characterising the conceptual nature of landscape representation that eschews any single, fixed point of view. However,
Peirce’s semiotic theory, as Elkins demonstrates in his essay, ‘Problems with
Peirce’, is enormously elaborate and hard to pin down and can’t be pillaged without damaging the whole. Ultimately, Elkins’ discussion raises more questions about Peirce’s theory than it offers assistance to any theory of visual meaning.
88
Kress and van Leeuwens’ system of modality markers seems much more applicable to painting’s specific features than Peirce’s trichotomy of signs.
The authors list eight separate markers of visual modality: colour saturation, colour differentiation, colour modulation, contextualisation (background detail), representation (amount of detail), depth, illumination and brightness.
(Kress and van Leeuwen,1995: 165-167). Although their colour terms seem defined more by Photoshop functions than by paint mixing, the theory itself isn’t affected. Any or all of the markers may operate within the same image and even though they function together they can separately occupy different positions on scales of ‘realism’ or ‘truth value’. The benchmark or yardstick for realism in their theory is the ubiquitous 35mm colour photograph and our contemporary habit of judging the realism of images in terms of our familiarity with this ‘optic’. I think this is a problematic aspect of their theory, again not fatal, and it arises because of their belief that reality is defined by social groups, with the consequence that reality is understood as a representation:
From the point of view of social semiotics, truth is a construct of
semiosis, and as such the truth of a particular social group, arising from
the beliefs and values of that group’. (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1995:
159)
(I think this is a definition of ideology, not truth). Any image can operate along several different modalities at once without visual incoherence. For example:
89 A painting can reduce naturalism in the way it treats colour, amplify it in
the way it treats texture, and yet represent its subject in a naturalistic
way…It can be abstract in respect of one modality marker, naturalistic
in terms of another and sensory in respect of yet another, and this
allows a multiplicity of possible modality configurations, and hence a
multiplicity of ways in which artists can relate to the reality they are
depicting, and ‘define’ reality in general. (Kress and van Leewen, 1995:
176)
This is an extremely useful, even liberating, model as it allows us to think about and to organise complex visual ideas into clear and coherent patterns of meaning in terms of routine painting practices. As viewers, it allows us to understand how different modes of representation can coexist in the same space without visual or conceptual inconsistency.
90
Fig 5.2: Richard Hook, Red Harbour, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 134 x 150 cm
The ambiguity of forms and spaces in my work is such that I would want it to be constructed in these different ways. Modalities introduce an element of the mobile and performative into what is traditionally fixed and static. The linear forms of Red Harbour (Fig 5.2) alternate between flowing, organic, multi-directional movements and contrasting measured, mechanical movements, structured in a grid pattern. Two modes are fused into one overall structure. However, contrary to Kress and Leeuwens’ theory, the image doesn’t invite comparison with photography as a measure of its realism because a photograph is a representation of a reality outside itself and this painting, though it may have figurative elements, is not only a representation of something outside itself but a thing in its own right, a
91 construction. This is the double-sided nature of abstract painting. I would argue that we cannot measure the painting against, or see it as, a kind of photographic image, but that we should refer it instead to our sense of the familiar in our everyday perception of the world. To approach abstraction
‘under the aspect of familiarity’ (Searle) demystifies the viewing without robbing the painting of any mystery it may have. I would like the abstraction of Coastal Architecture to be both familiar and strange and I think this is possible if we look at the paintings as we might look at anything in the world whose identity was both familiar and puzzling, and not try to see abstraction as a special kind of ‘language’. In this I disagree with Kress and van
Leeuwens’ account of ‘abstract coding orientations’:
In such contexts modality is higher the more an image reduces the
individual to the general, and the concrete to its essential qualities. The
ability to produce and/or read texts grounded in this coding orientation
is a mark of social distinction, of being an ‘educated person’ or a
‘serious artist’. (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1995: 170)
Apart from their contentious equation of abstraction with ‘the general’ and
‘essential qualities’, their idea seems unnecessarily excluding; I think that many people have no trouble seeing and talking about the anthropomorphic features of sculpture or chairs, for example, or appreciating and making an assessment of their aesthetic and design merits. And I am arguing that abstract paintings can also be in this class of things with regard to their ontology as objects and constructions, even while they are also in the class
92 of two-dimensional images in general with respect to their representational function. Kress and van Leeuwen come very close to this idea when they discuss Gerrit Rietveld’s Colour Project for the Schroder Residence of
1923-4:
…as no longer a reduced, abstract representation of reality, but a
design for a new reality, yet to be constructed. Of course, blueprints and
plans had existed alongside visual representations long before the
1920s, but in separate domains. In this century, however, they became
intertwined…The boundaries between representing reality and
constructing reality became blurred. (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1995:
174)
I am not suggesting that my paintings are blueprints for functional design, but
I am claiming for them an autonomous status similar to sculpture’s. In this regard, it is important to see the paintings in situ in architectural spaces as part of their aesthetic effect. On a wall in a particular space, they present a different figure/ground relation to their own internal configurations. This spatial relation is integral to their dramatic impact on the viewer and a not inconsiderable part of our enjoyment of them, especially of abstract paintings, because of their foregrounded visual dynamics.
In summary, abstraction in the paintings is relative to naturalism along different modalities. There are at least three phenomenal levels to the paintings:
93 1. As two-dimensional images in which certain features are recognisable
(under the aspect of familiarity). They represent things in the world
outside the painting that we might recognise.
2. As two-dimensional images in which certain features are not
recognisable as representing anything in the world outside the
painting. In this respect, the paintings are autonomous constructions.
3. As three-dimensional objects whose relation to the surrounding
architectural space is part of their overall aesthetic effect.
In our viewing of Red Harbour, we will perceive it according to gestalt principles. Supplementing our ordinary perception and recognition of objects, we can analyse it as I have done above. And the same kinds of questions can be asked about all its other modalities until we have sufficient descriptive material to build an idea that responds and corresponds to the material evidence of the painting.
So these features hang together: structuredness, perception as, the
aspectual shape of all intentionality, categories, and the aspect of
familiarity. Conscious experiences come to us as structured, those
structures enable us to perceive things under aspects, but those
aspects are constrained by our mastery of a set of categories, and
those categories, being familiar, enable us, in varying degrees, to
assimilate our experiences, however novel, to the familiar. (Searle,
1992: 136).
94 REALISM
I have been making claims to realism and I now need to specify what this means for Coastal Architecture, a group of paintings that are not mimetic in the familiar way that would allow the viewer to identify a geographical place, either familiar or strange, and that, if pushed, raise the question as to why they should be considered landscapes at all. Abstract landscape paintings have a way of producing an effect of landscape without identifying a locale.
They can achieve a sufficient degree of iconicity to cross the threshold into somewhere, identifiable as a space, if not a place.
Fig 5.3: Richard Hook, Submariner #4, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 51 x 133 cm.
If we consider the work illustrated in Fig 5.3, Submariner#4, we can see a clear enough differentiation of a linear figure embedded in a relatively flat, though nuanced ground. The linear figure extends laterally across the surface, edge to edge, and maintains a high degree of flatness with few perspectival vectors. As a figure, it is not easily read because of its abstract configuration, no matter how suggestive its forms are. If we ignore the figure and concentrate on the ground, I think we could agree that despite its all- 95 overness (an equal distribution of colour values and weights across the surface), there is a high degree of spatial extension, if not spatial depth. And if, as I would argue, a necessary condition of the landscape genre is its assumption of unbounded space as the medium for any other content, then that space will need to have at least a degree of recognisability if it is to be convincing as a landscape at all, if not to satisfy Harrison’s criterion of establishing the ‘distinctive effects in part through an illusion of relatively deep space’. (Harrison, 1994: 226)
Like the other paintings in this group, Submariner#4 attempts to achieve this through a partial figuration, following Kress and Leeuwen, by operating in certain modalities and not others, in this case through the use of local colour- tones and a visual texture of patterns to achieve a quietly pulsating, rhythmic field in which to hold the figure and to produce a strong impression of sky, sea and earth, some of the primary markers of landscape space. Spatial paradox is less dramatic in my paintings as the depth is more ambiguous, tending to float and push forward and back through modulated colour patches. In this respect it draws on traditional methods of atmospheric colour and the Impressionist use of complementaries in a high key to effect optical pulsations through simultaneous contrast. However, instead of a regular gradient of colour, weakening from front to back, my grounds are randomly modulated, mixed up, so that up and down, near and far are not clearly defined, but fluctuate in a manner closer to Hans Hofman’s idea of ‘push and pull’.
96 Consequently, there tends to be a disparity between the degree of abstraction in the figure as opposed to the ground, even though, within the formal-technical resolution of the painting, this doesn’t pull the whole gestalt apart and we are able to apprehend it as an integrated image. The effect is not the same, say, as bird is to sky, but more a case of bird becomes sky becomes bird, which is an easy transmutation for the medium of painting.
The colours in Submariner #4 are derived from the flotsam of a tidal zone, colours that can also be found in the surrounding sea, rocks, sand, sky and clouds. The overall effect that I have tried to achieve in this work is of a fluid space, strongly evocative of the local coast: sky and water over the earth’s surface, the bedrock usually visible in the red pentimento, producing an impression of unbounded space.
‘Impression’ is the word used to refer to the effect produced by using local colours in a modulated field and it deliberately calls to mind the preoccupations of that 19th Century movement. Although Harrison’s discussion of Impressionism is from a critical perspective, his observations on the effets in Impressionist paintings of the 1870s accord with my account of the ambient spaces of Coastal Architecture. He writes of Impressionist titles:
Effet was thus a term by which they signified the intention both to
capture a naturalistic atmosphere and to render a painting technically
consistent – to render it consistent in capturing an atmosphere, or to
97 capture an atmosphere in rendering it consistent. The point of effet was
precisely that it was not quite clear in which direction the determining
was being done. (Harison, 1994: 204-209)
Harrison does not consider that effet might also signify both form and content simultaneously, in the representation of natural phenomena that were then newly seen as essentially fleeting, through the use of fragmentary brushstrokes and shifting colours that refuse to solidify in the eye as permanent structures. Impressionist landscape painters invented a technique that, in its facture, signified their naturalistic, anti-classical perception of the external world. Just as in the 20th Century the ‘modern revolution in natural science led to the understanding that things exist in continuously dynamic relationships’, (Gooding, 2002: 7) painters have constantly had to invent new modes of picturing the invisible or microscopic in non-literal ways. The appearance of a kind of impressionism in the grounds of my paintings is no coincidence, but entirely to the point of establishing a fluid spatial matrix as the medium for the linear ‘bodies’. The realism of Coastal Architecture derives largely from these spatial effects of the grounds. The figures, on the other hand, lying mostly on the frontal plane and not consisting of discrete, recognisable objects, tend to contradict this space with their surface tensions.
REPRESENTATION & REALITY
All representation…is always under certain aspects and not others. The
aspectual character of all representations derives from such facts as
98 that representations are always made from within a certain conceptual
scheme and from a certain point of view…Strictly speaking, there is an
indefinitely large number of different points of view, different aspects
and different conceptual systems under which anything can be
represented…Every representation has an aspectual shape. It
represents its target under certain aspects and not others. In short, it is
only from a point of view that we represent reality, but ontologically
objective reality does not have point of view. (Searle, 1995: 175-6)
The implication of Searle’s distinction between representation, as always a relative cultural construct, and the existence of a logically prior, independent reality, is that it allows for the possibility of our directly experiencing an objective nature that is not already coded. This view explicitly repudiates the now almost ubiquitous assumption in art theory writing that:
A ‘landscape’, cultivated or wild, is already artifice before it has become
the subject of a work of art. Even when we simply look we are already
shaping and interpreting. (Andrews, 1999: 1)
Andrews’ second sentence is not contentious, but he can’t presume that what is looked at is ‘already artifice’ unless what we are looking at is a human construct such as a field or a garden. As these don’t occur naturally they are certainly ‘already artifice’ when looked at. But there are many things that occur naturally and independently of human agency that we encounter every day and especially when we set out to intensify the opportunities for such encounters, as landscape artists tend to do out of sheer love of nature
99 and to fuel their creativity. The fact of the existence of a non-human reality, able to be encountered in and for itself, seems to elude contemporary theorists who insist that reality is socially constructed and, as a consequence, ideologically inscribed and invariably reprehensible, as when Andrews can write:
Landscape, which has long meant either the real countryside or the
pictured representation of it, is in effect the combination of the two, or
the dissolving of the two together, ‘a natural scene mediated by culture’.
(Andrews, 1999: 15)
This claim is fundamentally mistaken. Two senses of ‘landscape’, ordinarily differentiated, are here elided so that consciousness and its objects are conflated; Searle terms this the ‘phenomenological illusion’. It is also indicative of a bias that Andrews’ book, Landscape and Western Art, contains not one landscape painting from the 20th Century that was made as a direct response to the natural world, which is all the more surprising as landscape painting is integral to English modernism. However, Andrews can also claim to be interested in ‘modes of representing both the subjective sensational effect on the artist of the forms and energies of the natural world, and the more objective insight into nature as an organism’. (Andrews, 1999:
180) This seems inconsistent with his claim above, but is certainly compatible with my own realism and it opens a door to a world outside ideology:
100
Fig 5.4: photograph by the author, 2011
I came across the tree on MM Beach one morning after a storm. From the distance it seemed to be more a mirage than a solid body, a blurred carcass of feathery branches full of promise, literally bristling with suggestions: the venous system in the hand, a stranded monster, a castaway washed up on foreign shores, a tragic struggle given up. Familiar yet strange on the one hand, like Freud’s ‘uncanny’, and a perfect demonstration of biomorphic principles of growth and physics on the other, with the soft angularities of the branch transitions tapering everywhere to myriad looping tendrils like weeping hair. It was an object of pathos and beauty and I couldn’t pass up such a perfect drawing in space. Perhaps more than any other of my landscape photographs, this one demonstrates my perception of landscape by virtue of the linear figure hovering, neither quite grounded or floating, in an
101 indeterminate matrix of sand and water and sky that so closely resembles my own conception of linear abstract figures in aqueous space.
A few months later I came across this passage from Thoreau’s Walden:
…the sand begins to flow down the slopes like larva, sometimes
bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to
be seen before. Innumerable little streams overlap and interlace one
with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which obeys half-way
the laws of currents, and half-way that of vegetation. As it flows it takes
the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot
or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down on them, the
laciniated lobed and imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or you are
reminded of coral, of leopards’ paws or birds’ feet, or brains or lungs or
bowels and excrement of all kinds. It is truly a grotesque vegetation,
whose forms and colours we see imitated in bronze. (Thoreau, 1941:
269)
Written in 1854, it can still serve as a model of acute observation that allows for fluid morphological transformations and the analogical imagination that feeds an artistic intuition of landscape. The photograph (Fig 5.4) is a record of this seeing-as and it contains a deal of useful information for further use. It does not reproduce the experience of my contact with it, which was a direct, physical, multi-sensory engagement under the constraints of gravity in unbounded space. What singled it out for attention, from all the competing,
102 surrounding sights, was its richly suggestive anatomy. It is not a found work of art; rather the artwork is in potentia in this small fragment of the world, not unlike Searle's account of the unconscious as being potentially consciousness, nor unlike Georg Simmel's speculation:
For there to be a landscape, our consciousness has to acquire a
wholeness, a unity, over and above its component elements, without
being tied to their specificity or mechanistically composed of them...By
nature we mean the infinite interconnectedness of objects, the
uninterrupted creation and destruction of forms, the flowing unity of an
event that finds expression in the continuity of temporal and spatial
existence...Nature, which in its deep being and meaning knows nothing
of individuality, is transformed into an individuated 'landscape' by the
human gaze that divides things up and forms the separated parts into
specific unities. (Simmel, pp 21-22)
Gestalt psychology maintains that visual perception is always perception-as, that interpretation is integral to the experience. (‘Even when we simply look we are already shaping and interpreting’ - Andrews). The ‘simplicity principle’ of gestalt also maintains that visual stimuli are apprehended in the simplest configuration possible under given conditions. This principle is of enormous importance for abstraction as it allows artists to construct visual fields that can be highly ambiguous yet still present to the viewer coherent figure- ground relations. Abstract paintings without cueing titles present problems in perception as ambiguities in both figure and ground can easily multiply, even
103 though a work may be formally coherent. On the aspect of familiarity that underlies our everyday recognition of things, Searle comments:
It is possible to imagine a limiting case in which absolutely nothing was
perceived as familiar, in which nothing recognizable and categorizable,
not even as objects, where even my own body was no longer
categorizable as mine or even as a body. (Searle, 1992: 135).
Inadvertently, Searle has captured the subjectivity of our inhabiting such a painting, a theme to be taken up in the next chapter.
In visual representation, to picture one thing in terms of another opens up a complex field of connections behind our everyday language of objects and processes. These commonplaces of figuration: simile, metaphor, analogy, metonymy, morphological correspondences: anthropomorphism, biomorphism, isomorphism and so on, make up a dense network of suggestions, of both visual and conceptual systems of transmutation. In
Coastal Architecture resemblances are never arbitrary or of merely superficial appearances, but always indicate a more vital affinity for structure or its corollary, function. Nature-as-architecture-as-landscape is the operation of an analogical imagination, derived from the experiences of a particular coastal environment, and I would suggest that this kind of imagining is the basis for more general design processes, whereby the end result could equally well be design or architecture, as art. At this fundamental level of the imaginative process, different areas of creativity are undifferentiated. This
104 idea informed my earlier works in Morphogenesis and, at the risk of mystification, draws on the suggestive parallels, in Freud’s account of the
‘dreamwork’, with the genesis of visual forms. Dreams, according to Freud, are ‘presented to us in images resembling those of poetic speech’. Having to represent complex real life situations in images, dreams are collaged from scenes, thoughts, speech and images. The logic of dreams is one of self- contradiction in which this material is condensed, simplifying it by ‘creating new surfaces’, a transformation in which ‘the logical links which have hitherto held the psychical material together are lost’ and replaced by ‘formal ties in its own texture’ and furthermore, ‘they reproduce…not as historical fact, but by conceptual grouping – condensation, displacement and pictorial arrangement’ (Harrison & Wood, 1994: 26-28).
As the paintings are not psychopathological structures, the ‘dream-façade’ in
Coastal Architecture is worked out not as repression but as imaginative freedom.
105 CHAPTER 6: BODY PRESENCE
THE BODY IN THE PAINTING
I have already alluded to some of the ways in which our bodily orientation is integral to the apprehension of a painting. The paintings in Coastal
Architecture are informed not only by a particular landscape, but also by how that place has been experienced through the physical sensations of movement through it. Essential to the expressive character of the paintings is the presence of bodily responses to the landscape, most clearly evident, I believe, in the skeletal structures and the strong patterns and rhythms that are a distinguishing feature of the works. In this chapter I want to consider how this psycho-physical relationship can be represented, through forms of imaginative projection, without the making of explicit depictions of the human body. The anthropomorphic simulacrum is probably our most common experience of seeing such ambiguous presences:
106
Fig 6.1: Fred Williams, Stump, 1976, oil on canvas, 123cm x 123 cm.
This expressive, frontal, relief-like ‘figure’, set against the dark depths of the
Australian bush, is a dramatic, puzzling contrast to Fred Williams’ earlier serene, classical notations of sparse landscapes seen from a distance, but in fact there are several precedents for it in his work: for example, Standing
Figure of 1960-61, Legs of Lamb of 1968, My Godson of the same years, and in the darkly outlined, heavier, twisted trees of two paintings, reproduced in Patrick McCaughey’s book on Williams: Yan Yean I, and Yan Yean II, both from 1972. That these last two paintings were initially produced on expeditions with John Perceval reminds us that Williams belonged to a
107 generation of Australian painters whose work represented wild landscapes from a primitivising perspective, using anthropomorphic metaphors in which the human figure and wild nature frequently exchanged places. The governing trope in much of the work of John Perceval, Arthur Boyd, Albert
Tucker, Clifton Pugh, Russell Drysdale and Sydney Nolan from this period is that of the skull beneath the skin, an impulse to see through the surface appearances of the world in a paradoxical vision of bones as a symbol of mortality and at the same time as a signifier of structure and permanence.
The world of appearance is the flesh that decays from the eternal bones of the world. This metaphor forms the landscape setting to human narratives of failure that characterise a great deal of the most progressive painting in post-
WWII Australian art. In the depiction of devastating droughts through skeletal forms (Nolan and Drysdale), in his parrot-head-stumps (Tucker) and carcasses (Pugh’s 1959 A Crucifixion), wild nature is personified as both a suffering body and a tormenter in countless harsh landscapes. An ambivalent vision emerges from these paintings in which humans and nature can be united in suffering but in which, at the same time, nature is antagonistic or indifferent, especially to the endeavours of white explorers and settlers. The
Australian painters are of their time in a wider context as well. For example,
Deleuze notes of Francis Bacon’s figures from this period:
Meat is the state of the body in which flesh and bone confront each
other locally rather than being composed structurally. The same is true
of the mouth and the teeth, which are little bones. In meat, the flesh
108 seems to descend from the bones, while the bones rise up from the
flesh. (Deleuze, 2004: 22)
The notion of becoming-other is exemplified by Bacon’s distortions of the human head and face in which slurring of the paint produces an ambivalent metamorphic passage, neither clearly human nor animal. What is solid (flesh) liquefies and separates out from its structural armature of bone. In an
Australian context, meat and bone transmute into earth, timber and rock. In
Williams’ archaic head, with its stumpy arm raised to its needle-nose, we get a glimpse of the almost hallucinatory aspect under which nature can sometimes present itself to the imagination, in this case a monstrous
Archimboldo-like assemblage of organic stuff.
But there is also something comical about Williams’ image in its wide-eyed grimace that undermines McCaughey’s assertions of its ‘monstrous power’ with origins in the unconscious. Even though a similar dark mysteriousness can be seen seeping through other paintings such as Hanging Rock from the same year, this may be a slightly tongue-in-cheek reference to the 1975 film,
Picnic at Hanging Rock in which four schoolgirls disappear into a dark recess in the rock face. If so, it has links to the 19th Century figure in the landscape tradition of classical deities as personifications of nature.
However, my interest here is in the potential of the landscape to provide us with natural simulacra (in the ordinary sense of the word, an ‘image of something, shadowy likeness, deceptive substitute, mere pretence’ -
109 Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary) that are both illusory yet a justifiable product of normal perception and our unavoidable tendency to make anthropomorphic projections onto the landscape, then read them out of it as natural. Our occasional apprehension, anxiety, even fear towards the otherness of nature, its dark places, violent energies, vast magnitudes - the basis of the 18th Century’s visions of the Sublime – may be met, as
Baudelaire suggests, by the use of the grotesque and laughter as a relief:
that laughter is the expression of superiority, no longer [as in the case
of the comic] of man over man, but of man over nature…If this
explanation seems far-fetched and somewhat difficult to grant, it’s
because the laughter caused by the grotesque has in it something
profound, axiomatic, and primitive that comes much closer to innocence
and absolute joy than the laughter caused by the comic of moeurs.
(cited in Fried, 1990: 254)
The comedy of the grotesque is much closer to Williams’ painting than any comedy of mores, and may indeed spring from a deep primitive survival reflex manifested in our seemingly unlearnt fears of certain natural conditions and species. Anthropomorphic forms have also been noted in Courbet’s landscapes (Fried, 1990: 238)
110
6.2 Gustave Courbert, The Black Well, 1865, oil on canvas, 94 x 131 cm.
Fried makes the claim:
that Courbet as painter-beholder continually sought to transport himself
into the painting on which he was working (and that this) could be taken
as explaining the irruption of anthropomorphic imagery in his art…as a
projection of bodily feeling into various elements in it’. (Fried, 1990: 241).
Courbet’s (probably) unconscious dispersal of bodily simulacra through his landscapes is suggestive - following Deleuze - of the body becoming, not animal in this case, but molecular. And, in fact, we have already seen something like this in the example of Pollock’s late all-over paintings in which his body presence is distributed throughout the whole work not only as large rhythms but also as microstructures, as texture, as the body in nature in the painting. 111
Fig 6.3: Jackson Pollock, Full Fathom Five, 1947, oil on canvas with various objects, 50.8 x 30.1 ins.
BODILY PRESENCE
…the traditional opposition that we tend to make between biology and
culture is as misguided as the traditional opposition between body and
mind. Just as mental states are higher-level features of our nervous
system, and consequently there is no opposition between the mental
112 and the physical…so there is no opposition between culture and
biology; culture is the form that biology takes. (Searle, 1995: 227)
On Searle’s account, it is our biological bodies that make direct contact with the world through all the senses in our unmediated physical experience. This is not a phenomenological account of enfolding the world and consciousness together. On the contrary, consciousness is our awareness of an independently existing world through the spatio-temporal location of our bodies in the world. What we make of this experience is cultural, but in the first place the body has to experience something outside it, even though the world experienced is continuous with the body. Penone has commented on this in connection with his 1977 work, First Breath: ‘This work is a reminder that every breath we exhale is an introduction of one body of air into an another, and that, in a sense, our innermost being is identical to and cannot be separated from the world around us’ (Gooding, 2002: 148), which is not to imply that the world and consciousness are ontologically fused as in phenomenological accounts.
This notion that our bodies, immersed through all the senses, both separate from and a part of nature, are integral to the act of faithful representation of the world, goes back at least to Turner and his apocryphal story of being lashed to the mast to in order paint:
113
Fig 6.4: J.M.W. Turner, Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead. The Author was in this Storm on the Night the Ariel Left Harwich, 1842, oil on canvas, 91.5 x 122 cm.
Truth or fiction, Turner clearly believed that the somatic experience, his struggle to maintain stability for example, in the landscape, was the truest perspective to take on this subject. ‘Turner’s concern to embed himself in the experience of the play of natural forces, and to let that experience dictate the terms on which the landscape image is constructed, is a new development in the relationship between the artist and the natural world’. (Andrews, 1999:
178) My interest here is in how the body makes its presence apparent in the painting when there is no overt reference to it, as is the case in Turner’s painting. In this storm scene, I think it is precisely the destabilising movements of the composition (vortex and turbulence) that position us, as viewers, with Turner, so that we become aware of our bodily efforts to
114 achieve stability. The body then becomes present in the subjective performativity of the viewing itself. Any viewing position implies the body of the observer, whether in front of or above (in aerial perspectives) or immersive, as, for example, in William Robinson’s circling horizons. If a distant viewpoint implies a degree of physical detachment, then John
Wolseley’s encounters are the opposite when he pushes his paper against charred bushes to achieve frottage ‘drawings’. The viewpoint of the work shifts with his body’s movement, which is implied by the indexical mark- making of the works themselves, in how they were done. The puzzling question of how the artist’s body can be present even when it isn’t overtly depicted can be partly explained by the fact that the experience of landscape is always an embodied one, and not merely because it is always from a point of view. Embodiment is part of the point of view and, consequently, may be built into the tissue of the representation in different ways. Its presence might be static or mobile, say the product of the artist’s moving through the landscape as integral to the apprehension of the place. Such movement may then reappear, transformed in the structures of the painting. With Pollock, the artist’s movements were literally part of the process, whereas in my work the format alone will often induce the ‘gestural’ movements that correspond to the experience of moving through. At this point we can note that the artist’s body has been involved twice over, firstly in the experience of a place and then in the manual working of the medium and the construction of forms on a surface. To force the point, I could say that the painting is the form the artist’s body takes in relation to the landscape; that this relationship, in certain abstract paintings and drawings, is the subject matter of the work. Visible but
115 not mimetic, it is an analogical structure more like a diagram than a photograph. In a sense, it has to be there if the painting has any truth to account for and which, if lacking it, will be no more than an empty design exercise. Gooding makes a relevant generalisation:
The other modality of abstraction, perfectly exemplified by the painting
of de Kooning and Heron, is that of a kinetic representation of the world
experienced as flux, as a complex of sensations in which it is
impossible to hold anything still. In this thrilling place our sensorium is
assailed by the teeming facts of the actual, and their poetic realisations
have the flickering inconstancy of fire. Painting of this kind revels in the
evanescence of the elements, in the ceaseless play of light and shadow,
in intensities of colour, in vivid creatures, in the rhythms of free dance
and the dissonances of jazz. (Gooding, 2008: 80-83)
116
Fig 6.5: Willem de Kooning, North Atlantic Light, 1977, oil on canvas, 203 x 178 cm.
The critic Richard Shiff advocates that the viewer of de Kooning’s work adopt a kind of kinaesthetic empathy because ‘to view a brushstroke means to comprehend its movement’. In other words, the body that traced the paintings is traced in turn by the painting, a presence that is much clearer up close than from a distance where the image tends to cohere as a unified whole.
Landscape painting of this kind is more likely to be the product of the body’s encounter with a place, in collusion with the artist’s visual perceptions, that will inflect the painting accordingly: walking, swimming, wading, climbing, lifting, touching, with the attendant sensations of weight, buoyancy, exertion,
117 resistances, sounds, smells, textures and so forth that can translate throughout the painting in completely non-literal, even incomprehensible ways, that defy ordinary logic but are nonetheless motivated, not arbitrary, signifiers of bodily presence. The body in the painting then is not a literal or figurative body but an analogue for a complex of psycho-physical experiences sharing the space with vision.
Fig 6.6: Richard Hook, Submariner #1, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 64 x 102 cm.
The most explicit body presence in Coastal Architecture is in the Submariner group where a schematic body is not too hard to discern. Its linear extension structures the painting so that it is formally an abstraction, and consequently may not be recognised as a swimming or floating body under the water. As I have been implying, the failure on the viewer’s part to make this kind of interpretation or recognition is not fatal because the idea here is buoyancy,
118 not swimming, and this idea should materialise in the formal-expressive features of the painting rather than in any naturalistic or figurative cues. The bodily presences in Coastal Architecture are dispersed throughout the various zones of the painting as traces: indexical, morphological and rhythmic.
Fig 6.7: Giuseppe Penone, Respirare L’ombra (To Breathe Shadow), 2000, mixed media, 468 x 549.5 x 7.5 cm.
In Penone’s Respirare L’ombra a wall is covered with flat rectangles of bay leaves held by chicken wire in a grid formation. Hanging from them is a
119 human lung composed of leaf and vegetable matter in bronze. Even though the individual elements of this work are clearly recognizable, its overall dispersal of elements is similar to the process of ‘becoming molecular’. This is no coherent body, but the coherent idea of a body, exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide in a vital cycle. In Penone’s work there is a close identification of the human body with various 'bodies' of nature; they form symmetrical metaphors, for example, human lungs and nature’s lungs. Our experiencing of Penone’s room/lung installation is a multiple sensation of being outside observing it (the bronze sculpture) while also being inside the lung (the room of leaves), a movement of ‘becoming-other’.
I have discussed some different ways in which the body, via landscape, has been imagined and represented as nature, within painting. Elkins notes that:
Like the body, landscape is something we inhabit without being different
from it: we are in it, and we are it. That might be a fundamental,
phenomenological reason why some writing on landscape, like some
writing on the body, seems unusually free of scholarly protocols and
signposts. Philosophy melts into impressionism: logic deliquesces into
reverie. The object isn’t bound by our attention: it binds us. (De Lue and
Elkins, 2008: 69)
Consider the following, for example:
‘…a need to look out at a space and have it look back’. - Jessica Dubow
‘I am Nature’ – Jackson Pollock.
120
Both these assertions are fictions. Dubow objectifies nature as other, but non-human nature isn’t conscious and can’t look back. Pollock identifies with nature completely but, in doing so, his own subjectivity and identity have to be erased, something that is not logically possible for a living human being outside brain death. Whereas Pollock’s rhetoric is phenomenological,
Dubow’s personification is an ethical insistence on the need to see nature as if it merited the autonomy and respect of personhood.
I believe that both assertions can be partly reconciled as fact if we conceive of our relation to nature in terms of Searle’s ‘biological naturalism’, which states that:
Conscious states are entirely caused by lower level neurobiological
processes in the brain. Conscious states are thus causally reducible to
neurobiological processes. They have absolutely no life of their own,
independent of the neurobiology. (Searle, 2004: 113)
Biology and consciousness, being causally connected, allow us to be simultaneously part of and apart from nature. We can perceive our own bodies objectively moving in and through the landscape even as we subjectively experience our bodily reactions to, and our bodily continuity with, the landscape. We are in it, and, in this I disagree with Elkins, we are it only in the objective biological sense, not in our conscious (hence subjective) sense of self.
121
NATURE’S BODY
Fig 6.8: Guy Warren, Gaia’s Refuge, acrylic on canvas, 150 x 180 cm.
The most vivid ‘metamorphic force’ imagined by contemporary ecologism has been to personify nature as a living body in the form of the goddess, Gaia, resurrected by British scientist James Lovelock to serve as a model for the global eco-system. In place of earlier deities representing aspects of the natural world, the new Gaia is that world, conceived as a living system. She appears, for example, partly hidden in Gaia’s Refuge (Fig 6.8) by Australian painter, Guy Warren, her classical draperies merging with the foliage of the rainforest. In this painting she is half-recognisable as a body and half merged
122 with the vegetation. Lovelock has revised his personification of nature as
Gaia, in the face of scientific criticism, towards a more sober systems analogy without, however, giving up his conception of the biosphere as an organism. (Buell, 1995: 200) A similar kind of spirit-presence appears to haunt some of the paintings of Per Kirkeby. His landscapes are heavily layered with history and geological ‘mappings’ so that they produce a strange amalgamation of almost violent vitalistic energy woven with elements suggestive of sober scientific illustration.
Fig 6.9: Per Kirkeby, Forest – Variation 1, 1989, oil on canvas, 200 x 130 cm
Andrews represents the ecological crisis as a crisis for landscape art:
‘More crucially still, we feel Nature’s dependency on us. Landscape as
a way of seeing from a distance is incompatible with this heightened
123 sense of our relationship to Nature as a living (or dying) environment.
As a phase in the cultural life of the West, landscape may already be
over.’ (Andrews, 1999: 22)
On the contrary, modern and contemporary landscape art is exactly not a
‘way of seeing from a distance’. Since at least Pollock, artists have tried to merge their subjective point of view and even their bodies with nature in a gesture of empathy. The survival of landscape painting, not as a form of fantasy but as an exemplary expression of our love and concern for the natural world, should be guaranteed, not mourned.
124 CHAPTER 7: COASTAL ARCHITECTURE
Malcolm Andrews, in Landscape and Western Art, asserts that:
A poet, of course, has recourse to metaphor in order to render one thing
in terms of different things, and thereby disclose unexpected affinities.
For the artist this is not available. (Andrews, 1999: 196)
In my paintings and in this chapter I take the opposite view: that not only is metaphor available to the artist, it is, in a sense, the principal subject matter of Coastal Architecture. In two recent exhibitions, Morphogenesis and Fluid
Mechanics, my catalogue notes ventured a poetic ‘manifesto’ in which my immersion in an imagined world of analogical exchanges between the human body, non-human nature and built forms should be very apparent:
Lighter than air…the bones of a wing…aerial architecture…skeletons of air and water…fissures in the rock…’patterns that connect’…wing, tower, aerial, cantilever, branch, bough, stem, arm, spine…
The analogies between nature and design are fundamental and provide a language of forms and an aesthetic of economy and fitness to task. My paintings take the familiar subjects of body and landscape and condense them into webs of energy and growth, elaborated as living systems that layer and merge the organic and architectural into integrated structures: ecologies of a sort. They might be skeletal, vascular, engineering or foliate: the colours are earth, water, branch and blood. Below the surface, blood circulates,
125 bones support and bend, water ebbs and flows, rock fractures and branches push.
Fig 7.1: Montage of linear structures.
126 Over the course of the candidature several subject groups have emerged in my studio output, not all them represented in the final exhibition, Coastal
Architecture:
Depot, Chassis, Marker Buoys:
Fig 7.2: Montage of Industrial Still-lifes
Breakwaters, Jetties: 127
Fig 7. 3: Breakwater, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 267 x 59 cm.
Port and harbour:
128
Fig 7.4: Montage of port and steelworks structures.
129
Fig 7.5: Richard Hook, Silver, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 59 x 90cm
Fig 7.6: Richard Hook, Shipping Lanes, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 64 x 69cm.
130
Fig 7.7: Richard Hook, study for Blue Harbour, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 76 x 59 cm.
Fig 7.8: Richard Hook, Blue Harbour, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 150 x 120 cm.
131
Fig 7.9: Richard Hook, study for Off the Harbour, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 76 x 76 cm
Fig 7.10: Montage of ocean and sky rhythms.
132
Submariners:
Fig 7.11: Richard Hook, Submariner #3, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 40 x 40 cm.
Fig 7.12: Richard Hook, Submariner #5, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 51 x 133 cm.
133
Fig 7.13: Richard Hook, Submariner #6, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 51 x 133 cm.
Tidal Zones and Pools:
Fig 7.14: Richard Hook, Study for Tidal Zone II, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 45 cm
134
Fig 7.15 Richard Hook, Study for Tidal Zone, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 67 x 72 cm.
These groups are loose amalgamations of works that share some structural features and which tend to congregate together in terms of their origins in the environment as much as in the final visual forms they take. They are not intended to mark discrete bodies of work, nor do they indicate any chronological sequence in their production. They reflect my long-term preoccupation with, and love of, different material aspects of the steelworks
(even its wastelands of scrap metal and disused machinery); the engineering structures of Port Kembla Harbour, especially its long projections of jetties and breakwaters; the ships that sit off the coast and then slowly glide in, as huge, moving abstractions, through the harbour-mouth; the vast skies and seas in autumn and winter off the breakwaters, down to the intimate world of rock pools and all the detritus of a tidal zone. Into all of this, on a daily basis,
I am immersed like a diver, from its shimmering surfaces to full fathom five, in body or imagination. 135
There is an unavoidable romanticism in making art out of subjective, bodily- informed experiences, but this is always only a starting point for work that depends on how an environment is apprehended and understood as something in its own right, with its own character and moods. Despite the focus on the physical in my titles, there are other elements woven into these landscapes, as I hope the exegesis has made clear: themes of the seamless continuities between the separate existential modes of world to body to consciousness, to making representations that then take their place as objects in the world, to offer their own experiences to other subjects.
Reflected worlds, but also constructed worlds made out the raw materials provided by direct experience of an environment, is not a description that would have appealed to Ruskin, or Courbet, who was adamant that: ‘Above all, the art of painting can only consist of the representation of objects which are visible and tangible for the artist’. (Nochlin, 1966: 35) The realism that
I’m claiming, however, is one that informs the philosophical basis as much as the visual modalities of the work.
Coastal Architecture pictures the relations between the natural and the built environment, not as a record of particular places, despite its debt to a specific stretch of the Port Kembla coast, but as speculative exchanges in which organic and geological forms synthesise with the built forms of industrial architecture and engineering. These transmutations originate in the unconscious imagination, and are developed or worked out, laboriously, in the processes of drawing and painting. Though my paintings are a response
136 to the coast and the industrial harbour, a place where solids meet air and water in spectacular formations, my work is only indirectly descriptive, referencing industrial and organic structures, natural spaces and local colour and light - the ‘textures’ of a place - but not its detailed topography.
A repertoire of basic forms or figures runs through Coastal Architecture as primary, secondary and micro-structures. They are deployed without regard for familiar contexts or functional accuracy. Their purpose is to suggest different existential scales and orders in unexpected configurations: an organic architecture. These hybrid forms are developed according to an intuitive logic that becomes apparent to me only after the event.
FIGURES:
Barriers: doors, gates, fences, walls, breakwaters, sea walls, reefs
Body: skeleton, armature, scaffold, spines, tree and torso, trunk to arms, vertical and horizontal axes, isolated events; rocks, islands, bone mass: pelvis, rib cage, skull, machinery, depots…
Branches, ramifying movement, currents, patterns, girder, truss, jetty, bridge, catenaries, articulation of movement through the joints – shoulder to elbow to wrist to fingers, like the annually inflected growth of a branch, the cross frames of a truss…
Currents: circulation, systems, nets and grids, flow and resistance, weaving and permeability…
Skin: surfaces, which can be ruptured and split or loosened to float or tightened for resistance.
137 Centres, nodes which mark a turning point such as when the tide changes or where branch becomes girder or cantilever…
Skeletons, scaffolds, bodies with space as the medium.
Flotation, shipping, all marine life in free fall -
Fishboat, birdswing.
If these transmutating forms were conceived as sculpture, they might take us to the mid-century American sculptor, David Smith: ‘Time is a new dimension in sculpture… I don’t accent bulkmass and prefer open delineation and transparent form – so that the front views through to the back’. (Harrison &
Wood, 1994: 578)
Fig 7.16: David Smith, O Drawing, 1957, bronze, 31 x 50 x 9 in.
…sculpture can come from the found discards in nature, from sticks and
stones and parts and pieces, assembled or monolithic, solid form, open
form, or, like a painting, the illusion of form. And sculpture can be
painting and painting can be sculpture… (Harrison & Wood, 1994: 749)
138 And also construction, as in each of my paintings a structure is proposed that
I have termed ‘architecture’, having no function but alluding to systems that exist beyond the frame, systems that may be organisational, like shipping lanes, or informational like navigation. Contemporary architecture approaches sculpture in its structural, morphological ambitions and engineering structures often achieve a sculptural aesthetic in complete harmony with functionality. In the freely imaginative realm of painting,
‘architecture’ is the projection of forms through, into, across space. For example, a jetty is such a projection with implicit movement (jettee, jettison, jet) that cuts through and against the currents and tides. This is the dynamic of Mondrian’s pier and ocean paintings in which all the visual information is reduced to horizontal and vertical movements that make up the dramatic idea.
139
Fig 7.17: Piet Mondrian, The Sea, 1912, oil on canvas, 82.5 x 92 cm
Fig 7.18: Piet Mondrian, Pier and Ocean 1, 1914, ink and gouache on paper, 50.2 x 62.9 cm.
Fig 7.19: Piet Mondrian, Pier and Ocean 2, 1914, ink and gouache on paper, 50 x 62.6 cm.
140
Fig 7.20: Richard Hook, Jetty II, 2010, multicolour relief print on paper, 105.5 x 45 cm
141 Any form possesses a dynamic both internally and in relation to its surrounding spaces and neighbours. It has its own finite spatial extension, but also the potential extension of movement through space that painting can easily represent, both iconically and indexically. Movement is tracked as growth, flight or flow through lines in space or through the spanning movements of branches, arms, girders, bridges and so on. These armatures fuse with their surrounding space in what would once have been termed a harmony, but which we might now prefer to call a self-sustaining or symbiotic relationship.
Many human artefacts invite biomorphic comparison, suggesting our reliance on and attraction to natural form and function as structural models for designing. (Bio-mimicry is a relatively recent field of design experimentation closely related to eco-design and eco-architecture) and my interest in morphological connections between the organic and the designed, at the level of imaginative formation, pervades this entire project like a ghost in the machine. No painting is descriptive without also containing an element of invention.
The working notes in Cecil Balmond’s journal, Informal, from 2002, illustrate these ideas from the viewpoint of an engineer who has worked with some of the world’s leading architects since the 1970’s. In the following examples he sums up some of the structural freedoms he envisages for building and which I regard as equally applicable to painting:
142 Let the informal in. Have a syncopation – a rat-ta-ta-tat – instead of the
dull metronomic one-two repeat of post and beam that rises up and
runs along our buildings in stark structural skeletons…Why not skip a
beat? Incline the vertical, slope the horizontal. Or allow two adjacent
lines of columns to slip past each other. Let space entertain us. Let’s
see other possibilities, other configurations of how buildings may be
framed and stabilised. (Balmond, 2002: 62)
Fig 7.21: Richard Hook, Tidal Pool, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 164 x 300 cm.
Balmond dismisses the rigidities of the modernist grid in favour of a more fluid interpretation, but one that is still strong enough to support the loads placed on it, such as in the design for the, as yet unbuilt, Chemnitiz Stadium:
143
Fig 7.22: Peter Kulka, Ulrich Konig, design for Chemnitz Stadium, 1995.
With Nature inspiring a chaotic impulse the architects Peter Kulka with
Ulrich Konigs’ initial design set out to interpret or mimic sources of
random energy. There was a declaration for the stadium to be non
building; separate orbits spinning in different ways. Each ring was to
have a different function attached to a metaphor; the roof a Cloud, the
main tier a ‘floating object’ and the lower seating a base oval of Earth.
In between the layers a random series of columns were to grow as
Forest. (Balmond, 2002: 130)
144 We find similar, and visually relevant, analogies being made in D’Arcy
Thompson’s comparative study of bridge engineering with the skeletons of quadrupeds in On Growth and Form in which he notes that ‘skeletal form, as brought about by growth, is to a very large extent determined by mechanical considerations, and tends to manifest itself as a diagram, or reflected image of mechanical stress.’ (Thompson, 1992: 262) In the architectural translations of nature into physical materials and structures, I see a process comparable to my selection of organic elements and their reformation as structures both in and of the painting.
Fig 7.23: Richard Hook, study for Coastline, 2008, ink on paper.
145
Fig 7.24: Richard Hook, Coastline, 2008, relief print on BFK Rives, 98 x 61 cm.
These works treat the grid not as fixed coordinates, but as a net – as something flexible that catches the matter that randomly floats into it out in the world. In Coastline (Fig 7.24) the grid is modulated between architectural rigidity and organic flow without compromising its structural strength. Where a branching line, signifying growth, becomes a straight path, we find a rational mind in contact with nature.
In my attempts to get at ‘the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing’ I have sometimes turned the landscape inside out, foregrounding the structural rather than the surface features, showing the skeletal and the vascular under the skin, all these various energies present and visible.
146 IN CONCLUSION
By contextualising the studio work within a loose network of different themes
– ideology, landscape traditions, abstraction, realism, metaphor and the analogical imagination and the situation of the body – I hope that I have demonstrated that a spirit of enquiry and experiment informs Coastal
Architecture. Among my objectives in this exegesis has been to argue for the continuing importance of the landscape genre in contemporary culture and the need for it to renew itself in response to social perceptions of nature and scientific knowledge. I have argued that in order to achieve this in fresh and unexpected ways we have to be free to respond to nature directly as an independently existing reality and for its own sake. Abstraction, as I hope both the exhibition and the exegesis have shown, is a flexible mode of dealing with these complexities beyond the field of vision.
Nature is what landscape painting and science have in common. They share the same ground and both use narrative, metaphor and observation. Both represent nature from different perspectives, time frames, scales or points of entry and both respond to historical and cultural contingencies. However, they each give different values to different aspects of nature which leads in turn to different forms of measurement, contextualisation, and visualisation, that is, to different symbolic languages, for very different purposes. I have been arguing, using the analogy of architecture’s relation to the natural environment, that landscape painting is not over, that ‘we don’t have to imagine, with the aid of alluring images of Arcadian natural simplicity’ what it
147 must be like to work with nature. To get beyond the irony and scepticism of the post-modern ‘landscape’ requires respect for nature, imagination and a refusal to be intimidated by totalising ideological critiques and by the fear of making value judgements that we know are essential for mutual survival.
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