Viewing Devices in Canadian Land Art, 1969-1980 by Tai Van Toorn

Home , Art Metropole, Bill Vazan, Kaj Pindal, Land art

On Site, Out of Sight: Viewing Devices in Canadian Land Art, 1969-1980

Tai van Toorn Department of Art History and Communication Studies McGill University, Montreal

December 2013

A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Table of Contents . . . 2

List of Illustrations . . . 4

Abstract in English . . . 10

Résumé en français . . . 12

Acknowledgements . . . 14

Preface . . . 15

Introduction . . . 19 Calibrating the Focus on Land Art . . . 19 A Review of the Literature on Site-Seeing: Theories of Perception and Site Specificity in Contemporary Art in the Natural Environment . . . 28 (I) Site Inspection . . . 29 (II) Site Recovery . . . 31 (III) Voiding Perception and Splicing Site: Robert Smithson . . . 36 Chapter Outline . . . 42 Figures 1-4 . . . 45

Chapter One. Charting the Terrain of Land Art . . . 47 Debating Definitions . . . 47 Situating Sites . . . 56 Conceptual Strategies and Photographic Documentation . . . 59 The Canoeman’s Reconnoitering Eye versus Land Art’s Oppositional Sight . . . 61 Figures 5, 6 . . . 68

Chapter Two. Roadside Attractions: The Vehicular Frames of the N.E. Thing Company, 1969 . . . 69 Automobile Landscapes . . . 69 Start Viewing . . . 73 Passing Views . . . 76 Road Trips . . . 90 Highway Readings . . . 108 Site Sensitivity . . . 116 Figures 7-18 . . . 137

Chapter Three. Conflicting Perspectives: The Shoreline Viewfinder of Dean Ellis, 1970- 1973 . . . 142 Aquatic Apparitions . . . 142 Perceptual Tools . . . 146 Illusory Views . . . 147 3

Paradoxical Planes . . . 159 Perspectival Traps . . . 168 Figures 19-32 . . . 181

Chapter Four. Shifting Sightlines: The Lakeside Viewfinder of Robin Mackenzie, 1973- 1974 . . . 188 Mutable Prospects . . . 188 Land Lines . . . 191 Declared Sites . . . 193 Somatic Stonework . . . 203 Tangled Triangulations . . . 214 Contested Loci . . . 223 Figures 33-47 . . . 227

Chapter Five. Hidden Habitats: The Arboreal Apertures of Reinhard Reitzenstein, 1975- 1976 . . . 234 Sylvan Glades . . . 234 Earthen Excavation . . . 237 Breaking Ground . . . 241 Subterranean Strata . . . 254 Hybrid Habitats . . . 259 Insights on Sites . . . 263 Sacred Loci . . . 269 Disappearing Acts . . . 273 Family Trees . . . 281 Figures 48-68 . . . 285

Conclusion. Targeted Terrain: The Site-Inscriptions of Bill Vazan, 1977-1980 . . . 295 Inscribed Sites . . . 295 Site Typology . . . 296 Reviewing Devices . . . 298 Sight, Site, Body, Technology, Identity . . . 299 Re-Writing, Re-Educating, Un-Inhabiting . . . 302 Hot Spots, Dark Spots . . . 304 Figure 69 . . . 307

Bibliography . . . 308

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1. Gary Lee-Nova, Mirror/Waterfall (detail), October 1969. Trapezoidal mirror supported on a frame installed in a stream in Vancouver. 185.4 cm x 121.9 cm x 109.2 cm. Reproduced in Gene Youngblood, “World Game: The Artist as Ecologist,” Artscanada 27 (August 1970): 46.

Figure 2. Robert Bowers, Search (detail), summer 1971. Series of photographs and a twenty- minute videotape made on Toronto Island, Ontario. Dimensions unknown. Reproduced in Joe Bodolai, “Borderlines in Art and Experience,” Artscanada 31 (Spring 1974): 78.

Figure 3. Bill Vazan, Roches solaires (Solar Stones), winter 1972-1974. Stones placed in tree branches, original location unknown. Dimensions unknown. Reproduced on the cover of Bill Vazan (Quebec City: Musée du Québec, 1974).

Figure 4. Michael Heizer, Double Negative (detail), 1969. 240,000-ton displacement of rhyolite and sandstone, Mormon Mesa, Overton, Nevada. 450 m x 15 m x 9 m. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Gift of Virginia Dwan, 85.105.

Figure 5. Tom Thomson, Northern River, 1914-15. Oil on canvas. 114.3 cm x 101.6 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

Figure 6. Emily Carr, Red Cedar, 1931. Oil on canvas. Vancouver Art Gallery.

Figures 7, 8, 9. N.E. Thing Company, Quarter-Mile N. E. Thing Co. Landscape, Prince Edward Island, 1969. Lettered signs planted along a road in PEI, series of tinted chromogenic prints. Each photographic panel 53.5 cm x 81.5 cm. Collection of the artists.

Figure 10. N.E. Thing Co., Quarter-Mile N. E. Thing Co. Landscape, Prince Edward Island (detail), 1969. Map and mixed media. 53.5 cm x 81.5 cm. Collection of the artists.

Figure 11. N. E. Thing Co., View, 1967. Cibachrome transparency, light box. 76 cm x 122 cm x 15 cm. Assembled 1995. Collection of the artists.

Figure 12. N. E. Thing Co., You Are Now in the Middle of a N.E. Thing Co. Landscape, September 26, 1969. Painted signboard attached to a tree in Inuvik, Northwest Territories, Canada. Dimensions unknown. Photograph by Lucy R Lippard. Reproduced in Lippard, “Art within the Arctic Circle,” The Hudson Review 22 (Winter 1969-1970): 672

Figure 13. “Big mistake / many make / rely on horn / instead of / brake/ Burma-Shave.” Burma- Vita Corporation road signs advertising Burma-Shave on Route 66, Hackberry, Mohave County, Arizona, pre-1963. Photograph by Ken Koehler, “BurmaShaveSignsRoute66.jpg,” Wikipedia, published 2006, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BurmaShaveSigns_Route66.jpg.

Figure 14. View of highway traffic as seen from a moving car and reflected in the rear-view mirror. Cover illustration of The View from the Road (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964).

Figure 15. Iain Baxter demonstrating “visual or sensory art instruction” in a non-verbal course in the Centre for Communications and the Arts, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, late 1960s. Photographer unknown. Illustration reproduced in R. Murray Schafer, “Cleaning the Lenses of Perception,” Artscanada 25 (October/November 1968): 11.

Figures 16, 17, 18. Above left and below: dancers and architecture students of the “Experiments in Environment” course build a “driftwood city” on the beach near Sea Ranch, San Francisco, summer of 1966. Photographs by Paul Ryan. Reproduced in James T. Burns, Jr., “Experiments in Environment,” Progressive Architecture 48 (July 1967): 134. Above right: Lawrence Halprin watches participants install a driftwood totem during the “Exercises in Environment” workshop, summer of 1968. Photograph by Paul Ryan. Reproduced in David Lloyd-Jones, “Lawrence Halprin: Eco-architect,” Horizon 12 (Summer 1970): 54.

Figure 19. Dean Ellis, Perspective Construction for the Salish, from the series of 39 slides entitled Landscape Morphology and Perceptual Tools, 1970-1973. Logs and stones assembled on a shore in British Columbia. Colour photograph, 35 mm slide. Collection of the artist.

Figure 20. Robert Smithson on Miami Islet, Georgia Strait, British Columbia, December 1969. Photograph courtesy of Nancy Holt. Reproduced in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 196.

Figure 21. Artscanada critic and artist Joe Bodolai “‘touching up the landscape’ at Revelstoke, B.C.,” 1973. Photograph by Erik Taynen. Reproduced in Joe Bodolai, “Borderlines in Art and Experience,” Artscanada 31 (Spring 1974): 80.

Figure 22. Barbara and Michael Leisgen, Description of the Sun, 1975. Performance in a field, black and white photograph on canvas. 120 cm x 180 cm.

Figure 23. Claude Lorrain (Claude Gellée), The Roman Campagna, circa 1639. Oil on canvas. 101.6 cm x 135.9 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Figure 24. Dean Ellis, untitled image from the series of 160 slides entitled Grounds, 1974. Colour photograph, 35 mm slide. Courtesy of Richard Prince.

Figure 25. Albrecht Dürer, Draughtsman Making a Perspective Drawing of a Woman, illustration from Unterweysung der Messung, 2nd ed. (Nuremberg: 1538).

Figure 26. Betty Edwards, “What Dürer saw; an approximation,” in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, 1979), 117.

Figure 27. Perspective Machine, illustration from Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola, Le due regole della prospettiva pratica . . . con i comentarij del R. P. M. Egnatio Danti, ed. Ignazio Danti (Rome: 1583).

Figure 28. Vincent van Gogh, sketch of a perspective frame in a letter to Theo van Gogh, August 1882 (223). Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam. Reproduced in Van Gogh: A Retrospective, ed. Susan Alyson Stein (New York: H.L. Levin Associates, 1986), 52.

Figure 29. Richard Long, England 1967, 1967. Rectangular frame and circle on grass in a park. Black and white photograph. 124 cm x 88 cm. Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London.

Figure 30. Jan Dibbets, Untitled [Perspective Correction], May-June 1969. Patch of turf cut from the grounds of the Simon Fraser University campus, Burnaby, British Columbia. Dimensions unknown. Reproduced on a postcard acquired by Iain Baxter, 1969, Unit General – 5, 1969, Box 10, File 2, Iain Baxter Fonds CA OTAG SC064, E.P. Taylor Research Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

Figures 31, 32. Above: Coast Salish fishermen standing on a weir and spearing salmon in the Cowichan River, British Columbia, 1973. Below: Coast Salish weir with trap and movable woven panels, British Columbia, 19th century. Reproduced in Reg Ashwell, Coast Salish: Their Art, Culture and Legends (Saanichton, BC: Hancock House Publishers, 1978), 29.

Figure 33. Robin Mackenzie, The Same Length of Line Connecting 1, 2, 3, 4, 1973-1974. 60.96 m (200 feet) of twine, found stones, and water, Loch Awe, Scotland. Twelve black and white wall-mounted photographs. 248.92 cm x 294.64 cm. Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa.

Figure 34. Robin Mackenzie, Split Stone Pieces, 1973-circa 1976. Granite and/or limestone boulders found and split open on the artist’s farm, Stonecraft, Pickering Township, Ontario. Black and white photographs. Reproduced in Angelo Sgabelloni, “Robin Mackenzie: The Long Vertical 1974/75 and The Split Stone Pieces,” Queen Street Magazine, Spring/Winter 1976/1977, 64.

Figure 35. Robin Mackenzie, No. 2 (Working Procedure), circa first half of the 1970s. Series of photographs. Photographer unknown. Reproduced in Eight from Toronto (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1975), n.p.

Figure 36. Robert Smithson walking along the Spiral Jetty, Great Salt Lake, Utah, 1970. Photograph by Gianfranco Gorgoni. Reproduced in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, 281.

Figure 37. Bill Vazan standing on Stone Maze during its demolition on a traffic island near Sherbrooke Street, Montreal, summer 1976. Photograph by Michel Gravel. Reproduced in “Corridart,” La Presse (Montreal), June 26, 1976, S:7.

Figure 38. Bill Vazan, Bridge, 1968-1972. Pieces of Masonite painted with acrylic and arranged amidst stones in a quarry lake (possibly near Montreal). Silver gelatin print. Photograph by Robert Walker. Vox centre de l’image contemporaine, Montreal.

Figure 39. Bill Vazan and Ian Wallace, Canada in Parentheses (detail), August 13, 1969. Lines traced in sand on Paul’s Bluff, Prince Edward Island, and on the Spanish Banks, Vancouver, British Columbia. Gelatin silver prints. Vox centre de l’image contemporaine, Montreal.

Figure 40. Robin Mackenzie, The Same Length of Line Connecting 1, 2, 3, 4 (detail), 1973-1974.

Figure 41. Timothy H. O'Sullivan, Tufa Domes, Pyramid Lake, Nevada (King Survey), circa 1867. Albumen print on paper mounted on paperboard. 20 cm x 27 cm. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.

Figure 42. Surveyor standing next to a “monument,” a cairn of stones, at a triangulation post on the boundary between British Columbia and Yukon, 1908. Reproduced in Courtney C.J. Bond, Surveyors of Canada 1867-1967 (Ottawa: The Canadian Institute of Surveying, 1966), 121.

Figure 43. A conical mound in a circular trench on the 49th parallel along the Canada-United States border, 1872-1874. Reproduced in Bond, Surveyors of Canada, 8.

Figure 44. Equipped with shovels, the Royal Engineers assist in a surveying expedition by building conical boundary mounds to mark the 49th parallel, 1872-1874. Reproduced in Bond, Surveyors of Canada, 8.

Figure 45. A detail of a diagram of the posts, earthen pyramids, and square pits arranged at right angles, implemented by the Dominion Lands survey of townships in the Prairies and British Columbia, 1870s. Reproduced in Bond, Surveyors of Canada, 22.

Figure 46. Surveyor Philip E. Palmer resting against a stone cairn at a triangulation station with a wooden marker, White Hill, Pictou, Nova Scotia, 1923. Reproduced in Bond, Surveyors of Canada, 56.

Figure 47. J.M.W. Turner, Kilchurn Castle on Loch Awe, circa 1801. Pencil on paper. 36.2 cm x 47.8 cm. British Museum, London.

Figure 48. Reinhard Reitzenstein, Revealed Roots, 1975. Ironwood tree with root system exposed and vertical sticks planted in the background, Ottawa Valley, Ontario. Three images from a series of six photographs by the artist. 76.2 cm x 114.3 cm. Reproduced in Reinhard Reitzenstein: The World Tree (Charlottetown, PEI: Confederation Centre Art Gallery and Museum, 1993), 13.

Figure 49. Reinhard Reitzenstein, Revealed Roots (detail of third photograph from the series), 1975. Reproduced in Beth Learn, “Reinhard Reitzenstein: Psychic Realism—The Terms of Natural Equivalence,” Queen Street Magazine 3:2, February 1977, 44.

Figure 50. Reinhard Reitzenstein during the making of Revealed Roots, 1975. Photographer unknown. Postcard announcing an unnamed solo exhibition of Reinhard Reitzenstein at the Carmen Lamanna Gallery, Toronto, March 13-April 1, 1976, Reitzenstein, Reinhard 1949— Doc/Ca, Artist File, Library and Archives of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. 8

Figure 51. Albrecht Dürer, The Great Piece of Turf (Das große Rasenstück), 1503. Watercolour. 42.8 cm × 31.5 cm. Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna.

Figure 52. Tom Thomson, Northern River (detail), 1914-15. Oil on canvas. 114.3 cm x 101.6 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

Figure 53. J.E.H. MacDonald, The Tangled Garden, 1916. Oil on beaverboard. 121.4 cm x 152.4 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

Figure 54. Nils-Udo, Root Sculpture, 1995. Hole excavated by a tree in Chapultepec Park, Mexico City. Photograph by the artist. Reproduced in Hubert Besacier, Nils-Udo: L’art dans la nature (Paris: Flammarion, 2002), 94-95.

Figure 55. Michael Singer, First Gate Ritual Series, 1976. Branches and saplings tied together, Nassau County, New York. Photograph by the artist. Reproduced in Gilles A. Tiberghien, Nature, art, paysage (Arles: Actes sud, 2001), 138. Figure 56. Reinhard Reitzenstein, Revealed Roots (detail, upside down), 1975.

Figure 57. Nancy Holt, Views Through a Sand Dune, 1972. Cylinder inserted through a sand dune, Narragansett Beach, Rhode Island. Diameter of tube: 20.32 cm. Photograph by Nancy Holt. Reproduced in Gilles A. Tiberghien, Land Art, trans. Caroline Green (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995), 203.

Figures 58, 59. Gordon Matta-Clark, Tree Dance (film still), 1971. Performance in a tree at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York. 16 mm film transferred to black-and-white silent video, 9:32 min. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Reproduced in Gordon Matta-Clark: You Are the Measure, ed. Elisabeth Sussman (New Haven: Yale University Press, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2007), 17, 41.

Figure 60. Nils-Udo, The Nest, 1978. Earth, stones, twigs, logs, grass in Lüneburg Heide, Germany. Photograph by the artist. Reproduced in Edward Lucie-Smith, Art in the Seventies (Oxford: Phaidon, 1980), 33.

Figure 61. Reinhard Reitzenstein, Revealed Roots (at left) on display for 17 Canadian Artists: A Protean View, Vancouver Art Gallery, May 31-July 4, 1976. At the centre and far right are works by Lyndal Osborne and Bruce Parsons. Photograph by Tod Greenaway. Reproduced in John Noel Chandler, “17 Canadian Artists: A Protean View,” Artscanada 33 (October/November 1976): 58.

Figures 62, 63. Reinhard Reitzenstein, Quartz Dig No. 1 (left), Quartz Dig No. 2 (right), 1975. Quartz unearthed and placed on dowels. Series of three colour photographs: 155 cm x 76.2 cm together. Reproduced in Alvin Balkind, “17 Canadian Artists: A Protean View,” Vanguard 5:5, June/July 1976, 6.

Figure 64. Unknown artist, Philosophical Tree, in Miscellanea d’Alchimia, an Italian alchemical manuscript, circa 15th century. Reproduced in Alexander Roob, The Hermetic Museum: Alchemy & Mysticism, trans. Shaun Whiteside (New York: Taschen, 1997), 307.

Figure 65. Gerolamo da Cremona, The Tree of Silver and Gold, in Opera Chemica, a Northern Italian alchemical treatise attributed to Ramon Lull (Pseudo-Lull), circa 1475, BR 52, II, iii, 27, f. 112ʳ, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence, Renaissance Manuscripts, Columbia University, Item ID: 23368. http://www.mcah.columbia.edu/dbcourses/publicportfolio.cgi?view=1454#.

Figure 66. Isidore of Seville, “Mandrake,” in Origins or Etymologies, 7th century. Copy by Hrabanus Maurus, 9th century. Warburg Institute, London. Reproduced in Oxford Junior Encyclopaedia, eds. Laura E. Salt and Robert Sinclair, vol. 12, The Arts (Toronto: J. J. Little & Ives, Oxford University Press, 1958), s.v. “encyclopaedia.”

Figure 67. Reinhard Reitzenstein, Untitled, circa 1975. Photograph by the artist. Postcard announcing a solo exhibition of Reitzenstein, Works Recent and Not So Recent, at the Forest City Gallery, London, Ontario, October 25-November 12, 1975, Reitzenstein, Reinhard 1949— Doc/Ca, Artist File, Library and Archives of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

Figure 68. Reinhard Reitzenstein, Connections: A Union of Opposites (detail), 1976-1977. Sepia- toned circular photograph by the artist of his performance in a forest. Diameter: 1.83 m. Reproduced in Joyce Zemans, “Reinhard Reitzenstein: Carmen Lamanna Gallery,” Artscanada 34 (May/June 1977): 44.

Figure 69. Bill Vazan, Hot Spots Shot, 1977-1980. Chalk markings on grass, Cité du Havre, Montreal. 110m x 615m. Reproduced in Bill Vazan: Suites photographiques recentes et oeuvres sur le terrain (Montreal: Ministère des affaires culturelles, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 1981), 62-63.

ABSTRACT

This doctoral dissertation addresses land art—ephemeral, site-specific works created from found materials, such as plants, stones, logs, earth, and water, in public and private outdoor locales—by Canadian artists from 1969 to 1980. I examine lesser-known artworks and writings by, and archival materials pertaining to, the N.E. Thing Co. (Iain and Ingrid Baxter), Dean Ellis,

Robin Mackenzie, Reinhard Reitzenstein, and Bill Vazan. Despite the diversity of materials and settings chosen by artists, the artworks of interest to this study are united by their operation as viewing devices that transformatively mediate the beholder’s view of the sites in which the works are located. My central argument is that three viewing devices featured in Canadian land art—frames, viewfinders, and apertures—deliberately destabilize the conception of site. These devices undermine the commonly assumed stability, visual coherence, fixity, and boundaries of sites by producing new, visually experienced sites displaying unstable, mutable, even contradictory appearances. I further underscore that these views respond critically to issues in

Canadian culture, history, and regional politics in the post-Centenary era. To develop this argument, the Introduction situates Canadian land art in relation to existing scholarship on theories of visual perception and site specificity in 20th-century outdoor art (predominantly devoted to American and European art). The Introduction specifies this study’s original contributions to previous scholarship before mapping the structure of the dissertation. Chapter

One defines essential terms, concepts, and debates, and proposes a contextual definition of visually oriented land art in Canada. Each of the subsequent four chapters, chronologically and thematically ordered, analyzes a particular type of viewing device and model of site in an artwork by a Canadian artist discussed in connection with contemporaneous works by international artists. The Conclusion reprises the central argument, expands on the contextual 11 definition, and extricates the principal characteristics defining land art’s manipulation of site through sight.

RÉSUMÉ

Cette thèse analyse le « land art » canadien produit entre 1969 et 1980. Cet art comprend des œuvres éphémères installées dans des lieux publiques et privés et fabriquées d’objets et de matériaux trouvés, incluant des plantes, des pierres, des bûches, de la terre, et de l’eau.

J’examine des œuvres d’art moins connues, des textes, et des documents d’archives des artistes

N.E. Thing Co. (Iain et Ingrid Baxter), Dean Ellis, Robin Mackenzie, Reinhard Reitzenstein, et

Bill Vazan. Malgré la diversité des matériaux et des lieux sélectionnés par ces artistes, leurs

œuvres partagent la fonction d’agir comme « dispositifs visuels » qui médiatisent la perception visuelle du sujet face aux sites où se trouvent les œuvres. Mon argument central propose que les trois catégories de dispositifs visuels caractérisant le land art canadien—cadres, viseurs, et ouvertures—déstabilisent le concept du site. Ces œuvres sapent la stabilité, la cohérence, la fixité, et les limites conventionnellement attribuées aux sites en produisant des nouvelles vues dotées d’apparences instables, changeantes, et parfois paradoxales. Je souligne aussi que les vues produites par ces œuvres répondent de façon critique à la culture et l’histoire canadiennes post- centenaires ainsi qu’aux politiques régionales. Pour développer cet argument, l’introduction situe le land art canadien par rapport aux publications scientifiques (dont la majorité traite de l’art américain et européen) concernant les théories de la vision et du lieu dans l’art in situ contemporain du vingtième siècle. L’introduction identifie les contributions originales de cette

étude à la littérature scientifique et décrit la structure de la thèse. Le premier chapitre définit les termes, les concepts et les débats essentiels au développement du land art. Il propose également une définition contextuelle du land art canadien orienté visuellement. Chacun des quatre chapitres suivants, organisés chronologiquement et thématiquement, examine un dispositif visuel et un type de site dans une œuvre spécifique d’un artiste canadien en tissant des liens avec des 13

œuvres d’artistes internationaux. La conclusion reprend l’argument, développe la définition contextuelle, et démontre les caractéristiques principales de la manipulation des sites à travers une diversité de stratégies visuelles.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The research and writing for this dissertation were generously funded by two fellowships from the Fonds québécois de recherche sur la société et la culture, a Recruitment Fellowship from the McGill Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies Office, and a Recruitment Fellowship from the McGill Arts Faculty. I thank my supervisor, Christine Ross. I am also grateful to Karin

Bourgeois, Maureen Coote, and Angela Vanhaelen. Archivists and librarians assisted me during my research at the following institutions: in Vancouver, the Vancouver Art Gallery Library and Archives, the University of British Columbia, the Public Library, and the Emily Carr

Institute of Art + Design + Media; in Ontario, the E.P. Taylor Research Library and Archives of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, and the Library and Archives of the National Gallery of

Canada, Ottawa; in Montreal, the Rare Books and Special Collections of McGill University

Libraries, the Médiathèque du Musée d’art contemporain, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

Library, and the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. I thank family and friends for their support.

PREFACE

The inclusion of NETCo and Michael Snow as the lone Canadians amongst the multitude of international artists whose works were displayed at the comprehensive exhibition Ends of the

Earth: Land Art to 1974, held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2012,1 conveys the impression that Canada made but a limited contribution to contemporary landscape art during the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, Canadian artists appear only in several brief, scattered references in the richly illustrated, meticulously researched exhibition catalogue.2 The roster of exhibited artists is ironic given the prominence and prolificacy of the landscape genre in

Canadian art history. The logic of exclusion behind Ends of the Earth is representative of the broader state of curatorial and scholarly work on land art. It is to such lacunae that this study of

Canadian land art responds. I here outline this dissertation’s original contributions to scholarship and knowledge according to four headings: (a) unique geographical, cultural, and political contexts; (b) an expanded chronological scope; (c) new additions to Canadian art historical subject matter; and (d) methodological contributions.

My focus on Canadian land art within its unique cultural and political contexts broadens the geographical purview of existing scholarly literature which has been dominated by research on American earthworks and, to a lesser extent, British and Continental European land art.

Attending to a Canadian context makes the obvious—but necessary—point that the tumultuous

1 “Annotated Checklist of the Exhibition,” in Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, organized by Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2012), 221, 238. The exhibition presented works by artists from the United States, Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Japan, and Israel.

2 Cassie Wu, Philipp Kaiser, and Miwon Kwon, “Annotated Chronology of Group Exhibitions and Events,” in Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, organized by Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2012), 250-254. The Canadian artists named in the catalogue include Iain Baxter and the N.E. Thing Co., Jeff Wall, and Michael Snow. The detailed “Annotated Chronology” names some Canadian participants in the exhibition 955,000 (1969-1970) organized by Lucy Lippard, including the aforementioned artists, as well as Greg Curnoe, Christos Dikeakos, Duane Lunden, and Joyce Wieland (ibid., 251).

16 and divisive political and cultural contexts that informed, and were critiqued by, American art cannot be neatly transferred to Canadian in situ landscape art embedded in a different set of politics, anxieties, and art discourses. To frame Canadian land art as a mere provincial extension or derivative reflection of the contemporaneous art production of larger American and European art centres is anachronistic and oversimplified. This dissertation highlights artists’ responses to regional cultures, historical conflicts, and identities.

The chronological scope of this study on land artworks made between 1969 and 1980 widens the time frame typically accorded by other scholars to the existence of innovative, critical outdoor art. Concomitant with the geographical omissions in previous scholarship, certain academic writings emphasize the late sixties and early seventies as the heyday of genuinely radical contemporary landscape art. Art historian Suzaan Boettger, in an otherwise cogent, thorough account, isolated 1973, the year of artist Robert Smithson’s death, as the cut-off point for “earthworks” and the dawn of “land art.”3 She relegated post-1973 international land art to a mainstream, institutionally sanctioned and funded devolution from the supposedly more critically minded, seminal American earthworks of the 1960s.4 (I discuss the differences between

“earthworks” and “land art” in Chapter One.) Boettger quipped that land art was “less avant- garde than avant-garden.”5 This comment diminishes land art to a diluted, decorative landscaping lacking the assertiveness, wit, and edginess of genuinely radical art, thereby painting a misleadingly homogeneous portrait of the widely diverse field of 1970s art. In contrast to

Boettger, I locate the emergence of land art in the late 1960s and trace its flourishing throughout

3 Suzaan Boettger, Earthworks: Art in the Landscape of the Sixties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 234-235, 238.

4 Boettger, Earthworks, 228.

5 Boettger, Earthworks, 239.

17 the following decade. A variation of Boettger’s insistence on the early 1970s as a historical terminus and transition arises in the title of the Los Angeles exhibition, Ends of the Earth: Land

Art to 1974. Whereas Boettger focused on American earthworks, the exhibition organizers

Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon addressed international land art, a phenomenon which, they argued, extended until about 1974. By that time, land art acquired public and institutional recognition and henceforth entered into a “new phase” in which it branched into “discrete identities,” such as public art and ecological art.6 Diverging from these authors’ somewhat arbitrary periodizations, this study extends to the late seventies and early eighties to examine the continuities underpinning artists’ diverse goals, thinking, and working methods. Unfurling a longer history of outdoor in situ art acknowledges the prolific output of land artists responding critically to current cultural and perceptual issues. In concluding this study at 1980, I do not pinpoint that year as the closure of a historical moment. Rather, for the sake of coherence, I restrict my focus to a decade notable for the consistence of its engagement with sight and sites.

As noted in Chapter One, one cannot definitively determine land art’s finale as some of the individuals to be discussed are still making art in the outdoors.

This dissertation also introduces new subjects and modes of inquiry to the general field of

Canadian art history and the thriving subfield of Canadian art from the 1960s and 1970s, both of which thus far lack comprehensive treatments of land art (apart from studies of individual artists).7 I illuminate the heterogeneous, innovative practices of Canadian artists, some of whom

6 Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon, “Ends of the Earth and Back,” in Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, organized by Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2012), 31.

7 Recent academic and curatorial writings on Canadian art of the 1960s and 1970s include the following (arranged alphabetically by author): Stéphane Aquin and Anna Detheridge, Global Village: The 1960s, ed. Stéphane Aquin (Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2003); Rose-Marie Arbour, Déclics, art et société: le Québec des années 1960 et 1970 (Quebec: Musée de la civilisation, 1999); Grant Arnold and Karen A. Henry, eds., Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980 (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2011); Vincent Bonin, Documentary 18 have been either conspicuously underrepresented by, or even absent from, scholarly writings and recent exhibitions of international land art. Each chapter highlights lesser-known, yet artistically and historically significant, creations by both well-recognized artists and talented, under- examined individuals.

Finally, the methodology and argumentation of this study make the following contributions. I emphasize the intersections of land art with disciplines and subjects generally not examined by art historical writings on landscape art, such as hodology, environmental perception studies, geographical surveying, and the occult. Furthermore, as discussed in detail in the review of the literature included in the Introduction, I develop approaches to land art that build upon and diverge from previous writings on visuality and site specificity pertaining to contemporary art in outdoor locations. This literature informs my emphasis on visual confusion, misperception, and compromised sight as experienced by embodied viewers engaging with particular Canadian cultural, perceptual, and political issues. Although details of the modes of sight and site at play in land art resonate with those developed in Robert Smithson’s art and writings, I distinguish land art from his oeuvre. This study focuses on viewing devices, practices of seeing, and models of site not examined by previous research on land art and constructs a new contextual definition for

Canadian land art (elaborated in Chapter One and the Conclusion). In keeping with the goals of land artists, the upcoming chapters endeavour to open new sites of inquiry.

Protocols I: Emulations of Administration in Artistic Practices of the 1960s and 1970s in Canada (Montreal: Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, 2007); Vincent Bonin, Documentary Protocols II: Artists as Cultural Workers and Information Managers in Canada (1967-1975) (Montreal: Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, 2008); Denise Leclerc and Pierre Dessureault, Les années 60 au Canada (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2005); André Lortie, ed., The 60s: Montreal Thinks Big (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2004); Catharine M. Mastin, Changing Spirits: Canadian Art of the 1960s and 70s (Kamloops, BC: Kamloops Art Gallery, 1998); Robert McKaskell and Marco Y. Topalian, Making It New! The Big Sixties Show, ed. Robert McKaskell (Windsor, ON: Art Gallery of Windsor, 1999); Michèle Thériault, ed., Actions That Speak (Montreal: Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University 2012).

INTRODUCTION

Calibrating the Focus on Land Art

In 1965, literary scholar Northrop Frye (1912-1991) succinctly defined the quintessential encounter with Canadian landscape as the explorer’s attempt to conquer and acquire knowledge about sites through intensive ocular activity. The colonialist eye’s sustained scanning, observing, and surveying contributed to the occupation, documentation, and exploitation of a variegated and dauntingly expansive land. Frye implicitly maintained that the viewing of landscapes, including both physical sites and artistic representations of scenery, was the prerogative of white

Europeans and their descendants: the “voyageurs,”1 explorers, soldiers, coureurs de bois, surveyors, traders, settlers, painters, and poets. By 1973, he introduced a unifying model of

Canadian landscape visuality spanning the colonialist era to the first half of the 20th century. This model consisted of the “canoeman’s eye” that “[peers] around the corner to see what comes next.”2

The era in which Frye honed his ideas about the colonialist’s grasping visual perception coincided with the emergence in Canada of a highly different approach to beholding the natural environment. Just as their American and European contemporaries created earthworks and land art in the outdoors during this period, so too did Canadian artists venture to forests, fields, and beaches to make site-specific art and explore new perceptual and aesthetic possibilities outside

N.B. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

1 Northrop Frye, “Conclusion,” in Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English, ed. Carl F. Klinck (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), 828. Practices for subjugating sites to sight first became institutionalized in the 18th century through the production of topographical sketches by British military artists and continued in the plein-air works by “artist explorers” of the mid-19th century. On 18th- and 19th- century colonial landscape art, see R.H. Hubbard, “Landscape Painting in Canada,” in The Artist and the Land: Canadian Landscape Painting 1670-1930 (Madison, WI: Elvehjem Art Center, in association with University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), 6, 15.

2 Northrop Frye, “The Canadian Scene: Explorers and Observers,” in The Artist and the Land: Canadian Landscape Painting 1670-1930 (Madison, WI: Elvehjem Art Center, in association with University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), 2. 20 the studio. In Canada, a preoccupation with undermining and even losing sight of sites came to the fore in land art, an emergent form of landscape art comprised of mostly ephemeral, in situ works created from found materials, such as stones, earth, plants, water, or snow, as well as manufactured objects, and installed in outdoor settings public and private. A minimally altered site, its landforms, and weather, could even comprise a work.

This study addresses the roles of sight and site in Canadian land art. I focus on land artists’ perceptual experimentations in artworks functioning as viewing devices constructed between 1969 and 1980. My central argument proposes that these viewing devices deliberately manipulate sight to induce a crisis in sites. Through their materials, structure, and placement, land artworks disrupt the visual coherence, stability, fixity, and boundaries conventionally attributed to sites. Artists demarcate specific locations to create new, visually experienced sites characterized by ambiguous, altering, even contradictory appearances. These new prospects are neither readily known nor occupied by viewers. Nonetheless, land art appeals to embodied beholders. As subsequent chapters specify, viewing devices integrate sight to varying degrees with other forms of sensorial and kinesthetic experience. I further emphasize that this dismantling of sites manifests artists’ responses to issues in Canadian culture in a manner that rejects the canoeman’s presumed natural entitlement to masterful sight. Through their viewing devices, some land artists reacted to the colonialist past and post-centenary present, while others dealt with conflicts and anxieties in regional politics, culture, and activism.

Artists experimented with site-specific perception through three categories of viewing devices—frames, viewfinders, and apertures—which I now define and illustrate through obscure, early artworks offering a glimpse into the historical beginnings of land art in Canada. While they share some formal features, these devices differ in structure and effect upon the beholder’s 21 experience of a site. In the following examples, each artist adopts a different strategy of manipulating light to subject sites to optical confusion, distortion, illusion, and other visual incoherencies manifested to subjects physically present in these sites and to viewers examining photographic documentation of the artworks.

Frames (defined more fully in Chapter Two) include objects that fully bound and offset a view as well as objects physically installed in a site to demarcate a tract for visual inspection.

The frames of interest to this study are either embedded in a site or a larger structure, such as a vehicle, within a site. Both the borders and internal surfaces of frames, such as glass panes or mirrors, produce important visual effects. An early frame-work circumscribes dream-like imagery on a reflective surface. In October of 1969, Gary Lee-Nova propped a large, unwieldy trapezoidal mirror amidst a stream in a wooded area of Vancouver to create Mirror/Waterfall

[figure 1].3 Two frames were present in this work: the outer contours of the mirror and a wooden chassis supporting the mirror.4 Gene Youngblood’s report on this work in an Artscanada article of 1970 implicitly pointed to the frames’ dynamic visual and physical transformations of the site.

He noted that Lee-Nova’s work “form[ed] a waterfall” in the stream5; the mirror thus recast the site by introducing reflections and instigating a vertical downpour of water. Through a liquid curtain, the mirror displayed distorted, rippling reflections comprising a luminous, parallel world surrealistically submerged in the stream. The framed mirror produced a spatial inversion whereby a slice of the heavens appeared to have fallen to earth. Youngblood, drawing from comments made by the artist, explained that “[p]eople standing at a bus stop across the road

3 Gene Youngblood, “World Game: The Artist as Ecologist,” Artscanada 27 (August 1970): 46.

4 Ibid.

5Ibid. 22

[from the stream] could look down and see the sky [in the mirror].”6 The unity and integrity of this distorted, topsy-turvy view were not to last. “The artist,” continued Youngblood, “predicted that children would smash the mirror with rocks. They did.”7 Lee-Nova’s framed site shattered into a dispersed, glittering field of innumerable, fragmented, miniature views.

In contrast with frames, viewfinders, the second device of interest to this study, are more portable contraptions facilitating multidirectional, geometrically bounded views (Chapters Three and Four). Viewfinders also place greater emphasis than frames on the simultaneous interactions between visual details internal and external to the cropped view. The limits of camera viewfinders shaped the chaotic unfolding of the second work. Robert Bowers executed Search on a summer night of 1971 in a thicket on Toronto Island which he described as “a good place to play hide and seek” [figure 2].8 Within a triangular patch of ground corresponding to the field of vision of a stationary video camera set up on the beach, participants armed with hand-held tourist cameras took turns at trying to photograph someone hiding in the bushes. The resulting still images, taken at eleven second intervals,9 capture a random, confusing assortment of blurred arrays of soil and vegetation locally illuminated by a startling camera flash. Bowers’s collaborative work constructs a site visually fragmented, disjointed, and in flux. Rather than purposefully selecting and neatly composing a view, these viewfinders mediate optical befuddlement in compromised seeing conditions. The intended object of the viewfinders, the participant in hiding, remains present yet tantalizingly lost from view. (Later in this study, I

6 Ibid, (contains a paraphrase of an interview with Gary Lee-Nova).

7 Ibid.

8 Joe Bodolai, “Borderlines in Art and Experience” (includes an interview with Robert Bowers), Artscanada 31 (Spring 1974): 78.

9 Bodolai, “Borderlines,” 78. 23 examine viewfinders made of low-tech, found materials without lenses or photographic equipment.)

Apertures consist of three-dimensional openings, cavities, and punctures either discovered or introduced by artists into matter (as discussed in Chapter Five). These works appeal to a broader range of senses, the tactile in particular, than the previous two devices. In addition to delimiting views and orienting sight, apertures filter or obstruct light and air while serving as physical containers or passages within sites. In a work created between 1972 and

1974, Bill Vazan opened gaps and nooks that intensified light to present and dissimulate visual details within a site. He carefully balanced stones amidst the sturdy boughs of a tree during a winter sunset to create Roches solaires (Solar Stones) which he then photographed during the sun’s alignment with the work [figure 3]. In his notes, the artist described the work as an act of

“sun framing.”10 While these openings circumscribe the sun, the bulky stones and branches obstruct portions of the sky and the snowy woods. As the last golden rays of the day pierce through the crannies, the stones resemble dark moons partially eclipsing the sun or meteors ringed with glowing flames. Beholders viewing the work at this crucial moment must temporarily squint or avert their eyes (the viewing apertures of the body) and therefore lose sight of what lies beyond the trees. Vazan’s apertures thus open blind spots in the site. His prospect is an illuminated spectacle and a semi-invisible elsewhere.

Viewing devices created from 1969 to 1980 comprise the main objects of close visual, historical, and theoretical analyses in a contextual account organized thematically in approximately chronological order. This dissertation refrains from evincing an exhaustive chronicle of a movement and concentrates rather on a cross-section of styles and strategies in

10 Bill Vazan, handwritten notes, undated, 2, Bill Vazan documentation file, 002707, Médiathèque, Museum of Contemporary Art, Montreal. 24 artworks by the N.E. Thing Co. (Iain and Ingrid Baxter), Dean Ellis, Robin Mackenzie, Reinhard

Reitzenstein, and Bill Vazan. These artists merged aesthetics and practices resonating with those of conceptual art, performance, sculpture, body art, cartography, and documentary photography.

Their artworks reveal parallel and often intersecting approaches to the dismantling of site’s stability through visual experience. I draw from a range of archival materials, including artists’ notes, maps, photographs, poems, rare ephemera, in addition to published sources and interviews, to reconstruct the making of these viewing devices, their site-specific existence, and beholders’ encounters with the works. While my emphasis remains the site-specific nature of three-dimensional, often sculptural, works, I also address the artists’ innovative photographic documentation and the varied dissemination of land art via galleries, catalogues, and journals.

This study further locates land art in the art world discourse produced by Canadian critics and curators during the late 1960s and 1970s. The interpretive vocabulary and set of references developed by these authors not only provide insight into the historical reception of land art but also suggest a basis and foil for my conclusions. Moreover, I examine Canadian art in relation to international artists and authors of this period. This study clarifies the functioning of land art’s viewing devices by drawing from key concepts pertaining to sight and site as developed during the decade under discussion by scholars in disciplines including anthropology, the history of landscape architecture and garden design, and, in particular, geographical research on environmental perception, hodology, the cultural role of surveying, and habitat theory.

Each chapter argues for a viewfinder’s inducing of a type of seeing (or not seeing) generative of a new site (inevitably, some of these works also reveal the inverse impact of sites upon sight). Serial scenes, enclosed vistas, panoramas, illusory views, misperceived prospects, site-specific revelations, and barriers to sight exemplify some of the forms of visually 25 experienced sites of import. I locate this study at the intersection of scholarship on visuality and site specificity in late 20th-century in situ art. As presented in greater detail in the review of the literature in this Introduction, much of the existing scholarship informing the methodological and theoretical foundation of this dissertation has focused primarily on public art, outdoor sculptures, installation, performance, and American earthworks (which I distinguish from “land art” in

Chapter One).

Land artists’ exploration of embodied sight requires further methodological contextualizing in the recent literature on the sensorium of art in the 1960s. In this context,

“sensorium” does not strictly designate the physiological or cognitive dimensions of sensation, but extends to the historically specific cultural practices and conditions shaping, and shaped by, the five senses. At a given historical moment and in a particular location, a sense or senses may be privileged above others and acquire specific meanings.11 As of the mid-sixties, a shift occurred in the sensory regime of Western art and popular culture from the visual and pictorial to the embodied, multi-sensorial, haptic, and synesthetic. In the United States, this transition consisted of the waning of what art historian Caroline A. Jones described as the post-war modernist “fragmentation and colonization of the body,” characterized by the differentiation and isolation of each of the senses.12 Modernist sensorial fragmentation had its foremost champion and theorist in art critic Clement Greenberg (1909-1994), whose formalist criticism of the 1950s and early 1960s privileged the “ocular” and upheld the flatness of colour field painting.

11 On the various adaptations of “sensorium” by geographers, historians, anthropologists, and architects, see David Howes, “L’architecture des sens,” in Sensations urbaines: Une approche différente à l’urbanisme, ed. Mirko Zardini (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2005), 322-331.

12 Caroline A. Jones, “The Mediated Sensorium,” in Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 7. 26

Canada contributed to the theorizing of the sixties sensorium. Co-authors Marshall

McLuhan and Harley Parker, in their book, Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and

Painting of 1968, built on a concept recurring in McLuhan’s other writings, namely, the “sensory threshold,” alternately called the “sense ratio” or “sense balance.” They argued that the reign of

“visual space,” endemic in the arts of a visually oriented society, had crumbled during the

“Electronic Age” upon the discovery of the invisible technological “environment” of circuit technology and non-linear transferals of information. In the wake of the visual there arose embodied, immersive, non-linear, tactile “acoustic space” inviting the subject’s active participation through all senses.13 Inexplicably, McLuhan and Parker’s book included no references to, or images of, the art of the late 1960s.

Within the multi-sensorial geography of the late 1960s, visually oriented Canadian land art staked out a distinctive terrain. The works and thinking of land artists did not conform entirely to the shift toward immersive or haptic experience. However, the views of land art did not exemplify the visual spaces of McLuhan and Parker, either. Although their artworks prioritized sight, land artists were not reactionaries and neither revived modernist ocular aesthetics nor rejected multi-sensorial experience. Rather, land artworks clearly appealed to embodied sight while eliciting other sensory perceptions. This study underscores that land artists challenged existing cultural models of sight in conjunction with their destabilizing of sites.

Visual experience was an inexhaustible inspiration for land art.

Meanwhile, I exclude certain forms of landscape art for the sake of coherence.

Photographs, videos, films, and forms of representational art not associated with an artwork

13 Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 28.

27 installed or performed in outdoor sites are not examined as primary objects of analysis.

Important examples of “conceptual landscape art,” such as Michael Snow’s film La Région

Centrale (1969) and Joyce Wieland’s landscape quilts of the seventies, do not form part of the sculptural and performative inclinations characteristic of land art created from objects and materials found and/or installed in the outdoors.14 Artworks created solely for indoor gallery exhibitions are also incongruent with the scope of my analysis.

Other exclusions also apply to subject matter. This study is neither a history of landscape representations nor an exclusive examination of the beholder’s experience of photographic or video documentation displayed in an indoor gallery.15 This dissertation also does not categorize land art as an “environmental art” informed by a particular ecological ethics. Subsequent chapters reveal instead the indirect influence of land artists’ environmental and social activism upon their art.16 Despite the prominence accorded by studies of 20th-century Canadian landscape- themed literature and art to the role of nationalism, including the enthusiastic “cultural nationalism” of the 1960s,17 I affirm that nationalism per se played an ambiguous, oblique role in

14 See Johanne Sloan, “Joyce Wieland at the Border: Nationalism, the New Left, and the Question of Political Art in Canada,” The Journal of Canadian Art History 26 (2005): 80-107, and Sloan, “Conceptual Landscape Art: Joyce Wieland and Michael Snow,” in Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity, and Contemporary Art, ed. John O’Brian and Peter White (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 73-84.

15 Visual documentation of land art and earthworks is thoroughly discussed elsewhere, including the following publications: Henry Sayre, “Open Space: Landscape and the Postmodern Sublime,” in The Object of Performance: The American Avant-garde since 1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 211-245; Colette Garraud, L’idée de nature dans l’art contemporain (Paris: Flammarion, 1994); Gilles A. Tiberghien, “Maps and Inscriptions,” “Near and Distant Landscapes,” “The Limits of Representation,” in Land Art, trans. Caroline Green (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995), 163-195; 197-231; 233-265.

16 For examples of recent publications on ecology, environmental ethics, and aesthetics in contemporary art, see Herman Prigann and Vera David, Ecological Aesthetics: Art in Environmental Design: Theory and Practice, trans. Michael Robinson, Aisha Prigann, ed. Heike Strelow (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2004); Amanda Boetzkes, The Ethics of Earth Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

28 land art. Many of the artists to be examined professed a greater interest in local or regional sites and identities.

A Review of the Literature on Site-Seeing: Theories of Perception and Site Specificity in Contemporary Art in the Natural Environment

I now review previous scholarship on in situ art to map major currents in theories of beholding, perception, and site specificity in writings by scholars, critics, and artists on contemporary art in the natural environment. Certain lacunae are evident: existing literature is mostly devoted to American earthworks and British land art. Issues of vision and landscape are generally absent from recent books on site-specific art of the sixties and seventies; these publications concentrate on the viewing conditions in galleries, urban public spaces, and institutions.18 From the scattered accounts of vision and site in previous scholarship, I extract three main currents, each of which I examine and assess separately for their relevance to, and limitations for, this study. Reviewing the literature clarifies this dissertation’s scholarly contributions, subject, methodology, and mode of analysis as I specify how the present study responds to previous academic forays into outdoor art. The first trajectory of research develops models of vision and knowledge operating in the beholder’s experience of an artwork in a

17 On the history of models of Canadian identity, see Jack Bumsted, “Visions of Canada: A Brief History of Writing on the Canadian Character and the Canadian Identity,” in A Passion for Identity: Canadian Studies for the 21st Century, ed. David Taras and Beverly Rasporich (Scarborough, ON: Nelson, 2001), 17-35. In the same anthology, see also Christine Sowiak, “Contemporary Canadian Art: Locating Identity,” 251-273. For a discussion of Canadian art in the sixties and seventies in connection with national and regional affiliations, see Catharine M. Mastin, Changing Spirits: Canadian Art of the 1960s and 70s (Kamloops, BC: Kamloops Art Gallery, 1998); Alvin Balkind, “Worlds Within Worlds and Hemispheres,” in Vancouver: Art and Artists, 1931-1983(Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1983), 188-189.

18 For example, see Miwon Kwon, “Chapter 1: Genealogy of Site Specificity,” in One Place after Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 11-32, and Nick Kaye, Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation (New York: Routledge, 2000). Both authors present sixties art within a phenomenological, Gestalt theory-inspired framework emphasizing embodied experiences of the indoor gallery spaces as epitomized by Robert Morris’s “Notes on Sculpture” essay series appearing in Artforum from 1966 to 1969. This paradigm gave way in the seventies to a notion of site as inclusive of the economies and institutions of the art world.

29 landscape. The second scholarly camp theorizes the loss of site in the art of the sixties and seventies as well as the related phenomenon of modern and postmodern artists’ restoration of site to visual perception. Mediating between the previous two positions, the writings and art of

Robert Smithson (1938-1973) underscore the disintegration of vision across diverse media and site-specific art forms.

(I) Site Inspection

The first scholarly current maintains that particular models of viewing and mental operations give meaning to an artwork’s relation to its physical surroundings. French art critic

Jean-Marc Poinsot upheld optical experience as integral to site-specific artworks. He divided examples of land art and earthworks that incorporated architectural features into two categories of ancient structures, each of which elicits a different form of visual perception leading to knowledge of a site: the labyrinth and the observatory. The oscillatory path of the labyrinth offers a progressive, gradated route to comprehension. Throughout this journey, the beholder experiences optical and mental uncertainty while encountering the occasional obstacle. Cognitive and visual awareness of the deceptive layout of the labyrinth arise through the beholder’s path of trial and error from the edge to the elusive centre. As examples, Poinsot cited Robert Smithson’s

Spiral Jetty (1970) and Alice Aycock’s Maze (1972),19 not that their structures are exact labyrinths but because they consist of concentric, curved paths that give rise to perceptual uncertainty. Similar examples not mentioned by Poinsot include Vazan’s snow mazes from the seventies and his Stone Maze executed for the Montreal Olympics of 1976 (analyzed in Chapter

Four).

19 Jean-Marc Poinsot, “Sculpture-Nature,” in L’atelier sans mur, textes 1978-1990 (Villeurbanne: Art éditions, 1991), 73. For a historical overview of mazes and labyrinths and their recurrence in contemporary sculpture, see Hermann Kern, “Labyrinths: Tradition and Contemporary Works,” Artforum (May 1981): 60-68.

Meanwhile, the “observatory”-like works are not observatories in the literal sense of modern astronomical facilities equipped with scientific instruments. Rather, the works referred to by Poinsot are monumental, often earthen, structures composed of simple forms. Reminiscent of

Stonehenge, these installations are strategically oriented toward points on the horizon and in the sky corresponding with astronomical events, such as equinoxes and solstices, or particular constellations, stars, and planets. The viewer in an observatory enjoys a locus of power and surveillance furthering visual mastery and knowledge of far-flung geographical and celestial surroundings. According to Poinsot, the observatory is an instrument or technical device constructed by, and intended for, those already in possession of specialized knowledge; in contrast, the labyrinth encapsulates the difficult quest to pierce the unknown.20 Monumental observatories arise throughout the seventies, such as Robert Morris’s giant Observatory (1971;

1977), Charles Ross’s Star Axis (1971-ongoing), Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973-76), James

Turrell’s Roden Crater (1974-ongoing), and Vazan’s weighty, pseudo-Neolithic log and boulder installations.

Whether in a labyrinth or an observatory, beholders examine not only the scenery but also themselves by gauging their locations relative to other subjects. Considering the relation between viewing self and other, art historian Rosalind Krauss developed the concept of “decentering” to explain earthworks’ powerful unbalancing of the body’s perceived centeredness. She analyzed

Michael Heizer’s colossal Double Negative (1969), a pair of deep earthen troughs, each 100 feet long, in the Nevada desert [figure 4]. Symmetrically divided by a steep ravine, the two empty

“slots” align to face each other. The viewer is physically unable to enter the core of the work which is an enormous void. One can only occupy a trough to look across the ravine at the other.

20 Poinsot, “Sculpture-Nature,” 73.

Krauss concluded that Heizer’s work rejected a psychological model of the self as securely centered in the body, the “absolute core” of the self. The empty hub and enormous mirrored grooves construct an alternate metaphor of the psyche as eccentrically related to its internal

“physical and psychological centers.” Standing in Double Negative, subjects conceptualize their relationship to their bodies through visualizing how they must appear to the eyes of others.21

Poinsot and Krauss shed valuable light upon optical encounters with art in the environment by constructing models of passive and active vision. On one hand, the authors insightfully presented artworks as seeing-aids operating upon receptive eyes. These works organize and orient the viewer’s perception by framing, focusing, and cropping portions of the surrounding site. On the other hand, the beholder actively responds to the works with a heightened visual awareness of, and interest in, the particularities of a site, including geographical formations, the effects of temporal passage, or fluctuations in ambient conditions.

Thus, the authors’ paradigms of visual, mental, and temporal experiences of site resonate with the phenomenological, experiential paradigm of site specificity of the 1960s. Nevertheless, their analyses reveal a presupposition partly incongruous with my approach to Canadian land art: these writings treat sight as a faculty that takes in or targets sensory data. While these art historians’ models of site-specific vision inform my study, I pursue a different route to explore instances of ambiguous, impeded, or deceptive seeing.

(II) Site Recovery

21 Rosalind Krauss, “The Double Negative: A New Syntax for Sculpture,” in Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Viking Press, 1977), 280. Also, see Krauss’s landmark essay on earthworks and postmodernism, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (1978), in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 276-290.

Other art historians have concentrated not on the act of looking at sites but on the withdrawal of sites from vision and the retrieval of sites through sculpture and installation.

Suzaan Boettger has examined the suppression of optical experience by two American sculptors working in the outdoors in the late sixties, Claes Oldenburg and Sol LeWitt. She analyzed the former’s Hole (Placid Civic Monument) of 1967 executed in Central Park, New York City, and the latter’s proposal from 1969 for an artwork consisting of an interred cube intended for the

Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport, Texas, an initiative led by Robert Smithson. Defying sculptural conventions, these artists dug into and buried objects in the earth, a gesture which

Boettger read as an anti-optical sculpture vaunting the conceptual content of the work over form and style. An interred object might be known through documentation or word of mouth, but not directly seen by an audience. According to Boettger, the rejection or occluding of sight (and site) brought forth the invisible other of perception: the “generating conception” behind the work.22

Whereas Boettger focused upon the denial of optical experience through the veiling of the depths of a site and its buried contents, art historian Thierry De Duve articulated that modern and contemporary in situ sculpture had lost any immediate or meaningful connection with site, which he defined as the union of place, space, and scale. Paraphrasing Smithson, De Duve declared that

“the site of all in situ art is a ‘non-site’” and argued that 20th-century sculptors even incorporated the waning of site into the subject matter of their art.23 Boettger and De Duve construed sculpture as the site of visual losses: the loss of optical access to art objects, the demise of visual aesthetics, the disappearance of scale, and even of site itself.

22 Boettger, Earthworks, 85-90. On LeWitt’s work, see Robert Smithson, “Aerial Art,” Studio International (April 1969); reprinted in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 118.

23Thierry De Duve, “Ex Situ,” Art & Design 8 (May-June 1993): 25. 33

In the wake of these losses, an alternate approach to site arose in sculpture through which artists retrieved visual experience and scale: the mobile body as mediator and producer of sites.

The following authors’ analyses of embodied perceptions of site form a point of contact with the writings of Poinsot and Krauss examined previously. To begin with, De Duve himself identified artists’ restoration of the relevance of site (and implicitly, of the immediacy of embodied sight).

He posited that the outdoor sculptures of minimalist Carl Andre and the walks of British land artist Richard Long regained a human standard of scale based on the trajectories of the body through stretches of unpopulated land, seemingly devoid of scale, beneath endless skies. Bodily scale, as a reference point, compass, and “measurement of all things” in the art of Andre and

Long, derived not from idealized anatomical proportions but from the pace, stride, and itinerary of a solitary pedestrian.24 Although sight and landscape were not foremost in his writing on site-specific art, theatre scholar Nick Kaye insightfully theorized the body of the performance artist as a “place” in itself,25 a disorderly, “unstable” site26 imbued with multiple meanings.27

Kaye referred to artist Dennis Oppenheim’s performances of the late 1960s, some executed outdoors, as strategies “to embody place.”28 In land art, the artist’s embodiment and navigation of site occur through various means. The body’s gestures and perceptions alter and mediate landscape. As a movable site and an aggregate of energies, the body not only transforms landscape but is also transformed by its surroundings through movement, labour, and travel. The anatomical proportions, symmetry, and sentient surfaces of the body all participate in artists’ and

24 De Duve, “Ex Situ,” 29.

25 Nick Kaye, Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation (New York: Routledge, 2000), 151.

26 Ibid., 163.

27Ibid., 162.

28 Ibid., 154. 34 viewers’ engagements with environments that test strength, stamina, and attention. The body’s movements also restore site to vision by measuring, plotting, demarcating, and unifying coordinates or landmarks. Meanwhile, although ecological ethics lie outside the stated purview of this review of the literature, I point to Amanda Boetzkes’s analysis of ecologically conscious earth artists’ exploration of the body as a receptive surface.29 However, in her writing, the artist’s body does not retrieve or establish particular forms of site, as in the writings of De Duve or

Kaye, so much as it participates in a withdrawal from the element of earth. In the art of Andy

Goldsworthy, Dennis Oppenheim, and Ana Mendieta, the artist’s body is the limit of perception and a “threshold to the excess of the earth” which,30 according to Boetzkes, lies beyond representation.31 She elaborated that “earth art [not synonymous with land art] expresses the loss of site as concomitant with a loss of sight that accompanies the sensual contact with elementals” such as earth.32

Sight played a complex role in the embodiment of sites as developed by art historian

Yve-Alain Bois. He historicized sculptors’ fascination with parallax and kinesthesia with an emphasis on the moving body’s fracturing of site and visual experience. Bois examined the unique spatiality and visuality in the oeuvre of American sculptor Richard Serra (b. 1939, San

Francisco). Serra’s giant outdoor sculptures elicited a complex experience of “deambulatory space and peripatetic vision” from beholders walking around and through the works. While the physical site is experienced visually as discontinuous, the body’s movements and paths create for the viewer the impression of a seamless, albeit confusing, continuity. According to Bois, Serra’s

29 Amanda Boetzkes, The Ethics of Earth Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 47-57, 145- 179.

30 Ibid., 57.

31 Ibid., 14-15.

32 Ibid., 20. 35 outdoor works revived the modern, anti-Baroque space inaugurated by the tortuous architectural engravings of Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778). Both artists produced decentred, non-axial, and disoriented spaces designed for aimless wandering.33

The preceding authors illuminate the historical moment of Canadian land art’s optical troubling of site with their separate analyses of (a) the plenitude or absence of visual experience and (b) the corresponding affirmation or loss of site in modern and contemporary sculpture. An unstated implication behind Boettger’s and De Duve’s ideas is particularly germane to this dissertation, namely, that the denial or relinquishing of visual experience and site are strategies proffering a new object for viewing: the spectacle of absence or lack. My work also diverges from these authors’ notion of an embodied beholder primarily defined by his or her gazes, gestures, and perceptions. While acknowledging such essential aspects of the viewer’s encounter with outdoor landscape art, my study also specifies that land art addressed and produced critically minded, often politicized, historical subjects. The subjectivity of the viewer of scenery surfaced in recent interdisciplinary research in landscape design and the history of landscape architecture and gardens. This scholarship does not generally encompass works of visual art, whether in situ sculpture or landscape paintings, but suggests methodologies for examining cultural attitudes and practices related to the perception of outdoor locales.34 My study also departs from De Duve’s and Boetzkes’s emphases on the loss of sites which the latter additionally correlated with the loss of sight. Canadian land artists situated their inquiries squarely in the realm of site-specific viewing which they sought to challenge, transform, and

33 Yve-Alain Bois, “A Picturesque Stroll around Clara-Clara,” in Richard Serra, ed. Ernst-Gerhard Güse (New York: Rizzoli, 1987), 41.

34 On vision and visuality in the history of landscape architecture and gardens, see the anthology Sites Unseen: Landscape and Vision, ed. Dianne Harris and D. Fairchild Ruggles (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007). One essay is devoted to contemporary art; see W.J.T. Mitchell, “Landscape and Invisibility: Gilo’s Wall and Christo’s Gates,” in Sites Unseen, 33-44.

36 revitalize rather than withdraw from, relinquish, or demolish. Subsequent chapters illustrate that

Canadian artists were less interested in the loss of site than in devising sites that partially or temporarily vanish during episodes of perceptual derangement.

(III) Voiding Perception and Splicing Site: Robert Smithson

Apart from art historical research, the writings and works of American artist Robert

Smithson have offered some of the most far-reaching ideas bridging sight and site specificity. Of particular relevance to this study, Smithson attended consistently to the flaws, incongruities, and deceptiveness of perception in tandem with critiquing assumptions commonly held about sites. A hostile mistrust of vision permeated his output of the early sixties. Although this work predated his famed earthworks, his initial grappling with perception presciently illuminated models of vision articulated in his later artworks and ideas. Smithson was scathingly sceptical of the primacy accorded by modernist painting and sculpture to the illusory effects of perception. This critique extended beyond questions of medium, abstraction, and representation to include spectatorship. In a letter of July 24, 1961, penned to Nancy Holt during an exhibition of his devotional religious paintings in Rome, Smithson berated the gaze of tourists as objectifying and demeaning to the dignity of historic churches and to that of his own work: “People want to stare with aggressive eagerness or they feel they must stare in order to grant approval. There is something indecent about such staring.” For Smithson, gawking at art amounted to committing flagrant defilement with “vulgar liberal eyes.”35 Art historian Thomas Crow interpreted this

35 Robert Smithson to Nancy Holt, July 24, 1961, reel 3832, frame 744, Nancy Holt Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., quoted in Thomas Crow, “Cosmic Exile: Prophetic Turns in the Life and Art of Robert Smithson,” in Robert Smithson, organized by Eugenie Tsai and Cornelia Butler (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in association with University of California Press, 2004), 41- 42.

37 disgust with touristy looking as a denouncement of the boorishness of modern secular culture.36

Also writing on Smithson’s paintings of 1961 to 1962, art historian Jennifer Roberts underscored the artist’s dismissal of the historicity of vision. He negatively opposed “profane,” embodied vision deployed in real time and human history with the transcendental, ahistorical vision of devotional immediacy and mystic revelation.37

This dismissal of looking led to repeated attempts by Smithson during the mid-1960s to eliminate the possibility of coherent vision through geometric, minimalist creations. These works investigated the physiology of vision and cultural expectations surrounding viewing.

Three years after his Roman sojourn, Smithson began a series of reflective, shiny sculptures, installations, and paintings epitomized by the neon lights and mirrors of The Eliminator (1964) and the multiple sets of mirrors comprising the now lost Enantiomorphic Chambers (1965).

Regarding the former work, the artist expounded that “[t]he viewer doesn’t know what he is looking at, because he has no surface space to fixate on; thus he becomes aware of the emptiness of his own sight or sees through his sight.”38 The surfaces of the latter sculpture consisted of paired mirrors that paradoxically reflected no images and thereby confused stereoscopic vision and retinal fusion.39 Crow noted that the work undermined the ocularcentricity typical of

36 Thomas Crow, “Cosmic Exile: Prophetic Turns in the Life and Art of Robert Smithson,” in Robert Smithson, organized by Eugenie Tsai and Cornelia Butler (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in association with University of California Press, 2004), 41-42.

37 Jennifer Roberts, Mirror Travels: Robert Smithson and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 25- 28.

38 Robert Smithson, “The Eliminator” (1964), reprinted in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 327.

39 On stereoscopic vision, binocular seeing, and retinal fusion in Smithson’s art, see Ann Reynolds, “Enantiomorphic Models,” in Robert Smithson, organized by Eugenie Tsai and Cornelia Butler (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in association with University of California Press, 2004), 136-141. For an extended discussion of enantiomorphism in the art of Smithson, see Reynolds, Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

Western art by displaying a void in lieu of the vanishing point of traditional linear perspective.

Chambers is a deceptive mirror that “generates blindness.”40

Throughout 1968 and 1969, Smithson further complicated vision by constructing his oft- cited dialectic of “site” and “non-site.” His works of the late sixties manifested an emphasis on site differing from that of the earlier minimalist sculptures. Whereas the works of the mid-sixties dismantled beholders’ visual experiences of their bodily positions before duplicitously reflective surfaces installed in galleries, the site/non-site dialectic established an interaction between the gallery and distant, “entropic” landscapes, many in abandoned, dilapidated areas of New Jersey.

The “non-sites” consist of indoor displays of photographs, maps, charts, texts, and geological samples, usually stones or earth. Non-sites display, represent, replace, record, or otherwise point to the perpetually absent, remote, unavailable, geographical “site.” Embodying the singular, the unitary, and the locatable, the non-site constitutes an abstracted, condensed centre containing a closed, limited set of information and objects. In contrast, Smithson correlated sites with peripheries, openness, scattered information, materiality, immersive experience, multiplicity, and an array of points dispersed across a map.41

Non-sites and sites engender what Nick Kaye termed a “dialectical movement” unfolding through the following paradox. As a conceptual site created through documentation, the non-site points to, and depends upon, the geographical site as a place of origin. However, that origin is absent and unavailable to the viewer in the gallery. As a result, the viewer attempts to situate the meaning of the work in the non-site in the gallery. The non-site consequently eclipses the actual site in the beholder’s attention. Ongoing flux in the work’s meaning and location defies the

40 Crow, “Cosmic Exile,” 47.

41 See Robert Smithson, “A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites” (1968), reprinted in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 364.

39 expectation that a site be knowable, perceivable, and concrete. To Kaye, Smithson’s work defined the site as a kinetic function deployed rhythmically in a “restless” deferral of meaning.42

The dialectic of site and non-site, in which each references and presupposes the other, presents significant implications for vision. Crow observed that “nonsites [sic]” cleverly punned on “non- sights”: non-sites represent something yet offer “nothing to see” of the original site. This dual nature of non-sites “signals their tacit parody both of concentrated modernist looking and the gestalt-dependency of Minimal art.”43

By 1969, Smithson conceived of new conditions for viewing art and landscape in plans for his earliest earthwork projects. The visual disorientation inaugurated by the Eliminator reappeared in a highly different guise in “Aerial Art,” a brief essay Smithson composed for the

April 1969 issue of Studio International. The text outlined proposals by Smithson, Robert

Morris, and Sol LeWitt for outdoor works intended for the Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport.

As explained by Smithson, these artworks would visibly demarcate the airport by “defin[ing] the terminal’s manmade perimeters in terms of landscaping.” Aerial art addressed the accelerated, downcast gaze of the jet passenger hurtling through the air during landing or takeoff. Smithson described the passenger’s dizzying, bewildered vision: “The rational structures of buildings disappear into irrational disguises and are pitched into optical illusions. The world seen from the air is abstract and illusive.” Dramatic shifts in scale observed through plane windows disintegrate from the “dazzling to the monotonous.” Such radically altered conditions for beholding art and scenery would, predicted the artist, lead to a “non-objective sense of site” ushering in a new form

42 Kaye, Site-Specific Art, 95-99.

43 Crow, “Cosmic Exile,” 53. 40 of landscape as “abstraction and artifice.” When surveyed from great heights, this scenery

“begins to look more like a three[-]dimensional map rather than a rustic garden.”44

Five months after the aerial art proposal, Smithson presented the mutual distortion and dislocation of perception and site in “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan,” published in Artforum. The article detailed a series of nine “mirror displacements” executed in various spots in Yucatán, Mexico, once the hub of Mayan civilization. By inserting and cantilevering a set of a dozen square mirrors in and on the ground in nine different areas, Smithson laid down an irregular, broken surface incapable of capturing a coherent, perfect mirror image. The mirrors reflect incomplete, dislocated, bizarrely flattened swatches of landscape. Reflections of sky are startlingly juxtaposed against patches of soil. The field of vision is fractured and infolded in ways defying reason and objective observation.45 Uncovering the anthropological and political currents of Smithson’s work, Roberts situated the mirror displacements within a dialogue between colonial and post-colonial models of vision. Unlike the “concentrated, focused, generative perspective” of the masterful eye of “Western expeditionary vision,”46 Smithson’s mirror displacements deliberately refuse to form coherent images of the jungles and ruins of the

Yucatán. According to Roberts, the mirror displacements register an unfocused perception passively receiving external stimuli without subjecting the sites to the Occidental colonialist values inherent in the mathematical order of one-point spatial perspective and the linear schemas of evolutionary history.47

44 Robert Smithson, “Aerial Art,” Studio International (April 1969): 180.

45 Robert Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan,” Artforum (September 1969); reprinted in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 119-133.

46 Roberts, Mirror Travels, 88.

47Ibid., 102. 41

Without addressing sight, art historian James Meyer informatively assessed site in

Smithson’s best-known earthwork, Spiral Jetty (1970). Meyer contrasted what he termed a

“literal site” with a “functional site.” The former is “an actual location, a singular place” for which an artwork is made.48 Spiral Jetty partially adheres to a literal site. However, Meyer detected in this work a crucial example of a functional site. Usually temporary in existence or accessibility, a functional site is best understood as “a process, an operation occurring between sites,” institutions, bodies, meanings, representations, and forms of documentation.49 Meyer read the functional site of Spiral Jetty as establishing a “vectored relation” across “a network of sites” comprised of texts, photographs, films, maps, perceptual experiences, and memories.50

Writings by and about Smithson offer a valuable ingress into contemporaneous developments in Canadian land art’s visual destabilizing of site; nevertheless, such ingress also abuts onto limitations. His use of technology, specifically photography, film, and transportation technology, to orchestrate visual and spatial disorientation, optical illusions, mirror reflections, and blindness suggests sophisticated models of the mutual inflection of sight and site. Many of his pivotal works resemble, if only formally, details of works from the same era by Canadian artists: Lee-Nova’s Mirror/Waterfall, the N.E. Thing Co.’s extensive series of mirrors installed in landscapes, Vazan’s monumental land drawings intended for viewing from a helicopter, as well as the plethora of “photo-conceptual” projects capturing run-down, possibly entropic, urban landscapes in Vancouver by Ian Wallace, Jeff Wall, Christos Dikeakos, and Bill Jones. Such formal and thematic similarities raise the question of whether a shared artistic climate existed

48 James Meyer, “The Functional Site; or, The Transformation of Site Specificity,” in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, ed. Erika Suderberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 24.

49 Ibid., 25.

50 Ibid., 30. 42 amongst Smithson, his fellow American earthworkers, and Canadian landscape artists, all steeped in similar ideas and references during the late sixties and early seventies.

However, overemphasizing these parallels leads to specious conclusions. Smithson’s art, ideas, and historical context cannot be monolithically applied to investigations of visuality, perception, and site by Canadian artists working independently from, and sometimes unaware of, concurrent developments in American art. Notwithstanding the cogency and innovation of his work, especially the “site”/“non-site”/ “non-sight” relationship, scholarly treatments of Smithson have unintentionally overshadowed the diversity of other models of vision, American and non-American, which flourished in art in the outdoors in this era, as demonstrated by Heizer’s

Double Negative. While Smithson and Smithson scholarship inform the overall orientation of my study, I explore under-examined forms of sight and site in Canadian land art not reducible to his work. In addition, the aesthetic goals of Smithson must be differentiated from those of the land artists. Whereas Smithson’s art and writings nullified and critiqued modernist conceptions of optical perception, land artists embraced the problematic nature and history of landscape-viewing to unsettle the fixity and comprehensibility of site in response to Canadian contexts.

Chapter Outline

I adopt a thematic approach to land art’s manipulation of seeing and the resulting crisis in sites from the late sixties to the early eighties. The itinerary of this study begins on the Maritime

Coast, sweeps to the Pacific Coast, and then alights in Ontario and Quebec. One chapter forays across the Atlantic Ocean to examine a work created by a Canadian in Scotland. Although

Canadian artists remain my focus, I bring their land artworks into dialogue with international artists and writers. The trajectory of the chapters is roughly chronological. I chart the proliferation of multiple artistic approaches and themes across time without plotting a 43 progressive, linear narrative. Certain chapters deviate from a chronological order to demonstrate interconnections across the main time frame. Following Chapter One’s explanation of key terms and debates referred to throughout the dissertation, Chapters Two to Five and the Conclusion each incise a separate facet of the main hypothesis by identifying a particular viewing device that undermined the stability and significance of sites. It should be noted that the viewing devices and associated sites overlap and are not mutually exclusive.

Chapter One, “Charting the Terrain of Land Art,” substructures this study with a contextual definition of land art and related terms such as “site.” To further develop this definition, I examine land art’s affinities with conceptual art before outlining the essential features of land art’s model of sight through a contrast with the canoeman’s eye of Frye and related Canadian paradigms of viewing.

The second chapter, “Roadside Attractions: The Vehicular Frames of the N.E. Thing

Company, 1969,” focuses on the site-specific work of the Vancouver-based collective, the N.E.

Thing Company (founded 1966-dissolved 1979). The artists intervened in rural roadside locales by appropriating framing apparatuses associated with automobiles and highway travel. Through this roadwork, NETCo constructed a particular type of visually mediated site—the intangible, framed “view”—which I locate at the intersection of automobile and travel cultures, the emerging field of environmental perception studies of the late 1960s, and experimental West

Coast models of viewership and “visual sensitivity.”

Sculptural works of stone and wood installed near water in the early 1970s are the subjects of the third and fourth chapters. I propose that these works function as “viewfinders” generating sites characterized by unstable visual appearances and shifting boundaries. Chapter

Three, “Conflicting Perspectives: The Shoreline Viewfinder of Dean Ellis, 1970-1973,” 44 examines the British Columbian artist’s manipulations of optical illusions and depth perception in a larger critique of the cultural significance of spatial compositions and linear perspective in the history of Western art as well as colonialist, Eurocentric visuality in British Columbian history. Chapter Four, “Shifting Sightlines: The Lakeside Viewfinder of Robin Mackenzie, 1973-

1974,” uncovers the Ontarian artist’s creation of visually fluctuating and expanding sites contingent upon embodied viewing and manifesting a politically subversive adaptation of geographical surveying to be situated in the post-centennial cultural clime and Mackenzie’s political, social, and environmental activism in rural Ontarian communities.

Compromised viewing conditions figure in the fifth chapter, “Hidden Habitats: The

Arboreal Apertures of Reinhard Reitzenstein, 1975-1976.” I analyze the apertures in a semi- performative, semi-sculptural work created by the Ontario-based artist amidst trees and in earth.

His artwork, I argue, suspends the site in an intentionally irresolvable dynamic between visibility and invisibility. The chapter examines an array of site-specific apertures, the occurrence of perceptual and spiritual revelations in this work, the artist’s simultaneous bodily self-display and erasure, and his negotiation of his cultural identity as an émigré to Canada.

The conclusion returns to an artist whose works recur throughout this study. Features of all three viewing devices merge in a monumental drawing on grass by a Montreal artist in

“Targeted Terrain: The Site-Inscriptions of Bill Vazan, 1977-1980.” I here reprise the central hypothesis unfolded by the previous chapters. By examining details of Vazan’s work, the conclusion maps the shared formal features, perceptual strategies, and aims of land art to round out the contextual definition proposed in Chapter One.

INTRODUCTION: FIGURES 1-4

Images were removed due to copyright restrictions.

CHAPTER ONE. CHARTING THE TERRAIN OF LAND ART

Debating Definitions

The task of historically situating land art’s erosion of sites through viewing devices seemingly presupposes a widely accepted definition for this art form. Such a consensus is nonexistent. Conflicting terminology reigns in scholarship. Therefore, this chapter frames the central hypothesis and contributes to the terminological, historical, thematic, and theoretical foundation of subsequent chapters by outlining a contextual, flexible definition and description of Canadian land art anchored in issues of vision, visuality, and site specificity inflected by

Canadian historical contexts. This analysis formulates a concept of land art simultaneously sharper and broader than many previous usages. Serious consideration of definitional disagreements is neither tangential bickering over nomenclature nor an attempt to rigidly categorize and forcibly pin down the diversity of approaches to landscape. Rather, accounting for the emergence and deployment of the term “land art” is integral to synchronically locating

Canadian land-works in relation to national and international art and diachronically plotting land art in a longer history of Western landscape. A contextually based definition also advantageously enables a focused examination of the circulation and adaptability of a term over time. In lieu of reducing a definition to a single statement, this chapter progressively develops the definition by presenting the formal qualities, materials, working methods, and documentary strategies of land art. I then nuance “land art” by explaining my use of the adaptable, yet historically specific, term

“site” before examining the resonance between the aesthetic and documentary strategies of land art and those of conceptual art. This chapter culminates with a delineation of the shared features of the modes of sight privileged by land artists contrasted with the visuality of the

“canoeman’s eye” proposed by Frye. 48

In preparation for locating land art in Canada, I first extricate the essential characteristics of the generalized term “international land art” as agreed upon by scholars. “Land art” has been entangled in numerous conflicts and conflations with the more narrowly focused “earthworks.”

Neither a cohesive movement nor a formal genre, “land art” is an umbrella term designating in situ art created in outdoor, mostly non-urban settings, and made from organic, botanical, or mineralogical materials. Snow, water, air, light, weather, and landforms also form part of land artworks. Artists occasionally integrate manufactured or found objects into their creations.

Incorporating the materiality and sensuousness of nature, many land-works exhibit a sculptural impulse in which also linger allusions to gardens, labyrinths, and architecture. Yet, the same artworks which betray a fascination with textures and scents also partake of the more theoretical and experimental concerns of conceptual art and process art.

“Earthworks” is a more specific term, referring not simply to an art form but to a movement flourishing in the United States between roughly 1967 and 1973, comprised mostly of

New York-based artists. Originating as a term from engineering, “earthworks” gained currency in the sixties amongst artists, curators, gallery-owners, and critics. Geological matter—earth, dirt, soil, sand, and stones—was the medium of choice for earthworkers Robert Smithson,

Michael Heizer, Robert Morris, Walter De Maria, and Dennis Oppenheim. “Earthworks” indicates literally an art made of earth rather than an art strictly about the Earth, that is, art thematically connected to nature, ecology, or the planet.

Despite the differences between the two categories, debates persist over geographical and chronological categorizations. Certain scholars maintain land art as a predominantly European phenomenon, exemplified by British artists Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, the German Nils- 49

Udo, and Netherlander Jan Dibbets.1 Art historians who maintain these cultural distinctions contrast, perhaps excessively, the gentler, ephemeral touch of an ecologically oriented European land aesthetic with the monumentality and austerity of American earthworks.2 Nevertheless,

Americans played pivotal roles in the inception of art in the outdoors and hence some authors include US earthworks as land art. To further complicate matters, while certain scholars select terms correlating with artists’ cultural affiliations, other uses apparently stem from art historians’ personal backgrounds, such that European writers may inclusively name American earthworks as

“land art,” unlike some North American writers’ preference for the precision of “earthworks.”3

Other disagreements arise over the historical origins of land art. Most locate the genesis of land art in the sixties contemporaneous with post-minimalist sculpture and arte povera. Rival accounts of the term’s beginnings continue to proliferate. In 1969, filmmaker Gerry Schum aired a series of artists’ films, entitled Land Art, on German television; Oppenheim, Smithson, Long,

1 Stephen Bann upheld British artists Richard Long’s and Hamish Fulton’s use of mapping and walking as land art; see Bann, “The Map as Index of the Real: Land Art and the Authentication of Travel,” Imago Mundi 46 (1994): 9-18. Suzaan Boettger also strictly distinguished US Earthworks from European and post-1973 international land art; see Boettger, Earthworks, 24, 238-239.

2 On the differences and similarities between European and American approaches to working in the natural environment, see Colette Garraud, L’idée de nature dans l’art contemporain (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 12; John Beardsley, Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Landscape, 3rd ed. (New York: Abbeville Press, 1998), 41.

3 The following European authors used “land art” to refer to American earthworks and European land art; see Gilles Tiberghien, Land Art, trans. Caroline Green (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995); Michael Lailach, Land Art, trans. Boris Kremer (Paris: Taschen, 2007); Anne-Françoise Penders, En chemin, le land art, vol. 1, Partir, and vol. 2, Revenir (Brussels: Lettre volée, 1999); Jean-Paul Brun, Nature, art contemporain et société: le Land Art comme analyseur du social, vol. 1, Nature sauvage, Contre Culture et Land Art (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005), Nadine Coleno, Petite tache au pays du Land Art (Paris: Éditions du regard, 1990), and Tonia Raquejo, Land Art (Madrid: Nerea, 1998). Danish artist Jørn Rønnau correlated “land art” with recent in situ works by both European and North American artists; see Rønnau, Krakamarken: Land Art as Process, trans. Dan Marmorstein (Denmark: Forlaget Djurs, 2001). Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon designate American and international in situ artworks as “land art”; see Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2012). Curator Barbara Matilsky further differentiated “environmental art” of the late 1960s and early 1970s from later examples of “ecological art” emphasizing the reclamation and revitalization of devastated natural ecosystems. This categorization recurs throughout her Fragile Ecologies (New York: Rizzoli, 1992).

50 and Dibbets numbered amongst the artists whose works were broadcast.4 Yet, Heizer credited

De Maria with coining “land art” as early as 1967.5 Recently, art historians and exhibition organizers Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon cited 1974 as the demise of radical, critically minded land art.6 However, according to the sharply contrasting historical periodization of

Suzaan Boettger, radical earthworks ceded in 1973 to a less political, more intellectually accessible form of publicly funded, site-specific art, which she categorized as land art. 7

Relatively less has been written, and hence debated, about Canadian land art as a distinct corpus of work. This paucity of scholarly attention may partially derive from the lack of a coherent, tightly knit community of artists working in the outdoors. Scattered across the country and often working independently, land artists did not congeal into a definable movement thriving in a key city. The artists I shall discuss did not stage group exhibitions expressly devoted to land art and no particular artist emerged as a predominant theorist or catalyst comparable to Robert

Smithson vis à vis the earthworkers. In Canada, artists and critics did not unanimously adhere to a particular title to qualify contemporary landscape art. Perhaps these artists felt no need to collectively define themselves as land artists or as any other contingent. Nevertheless, their works are undeniable evidence of an actual, cohesive historical phenomenon exhibiting striking affinities amongst individuals living and working across the country, including shared preferences in materials, locales, and perceptual themes. “Land art” offers a useful retroactive

4 See Ursula Wevers, “Gerry Schum: The Television Gallery [,] the Idea [,] and How it Failed,” in Museums by Artists, ed. A. A. Bronson and Peggy Gale (1979; repr., Toronto: Art Metropole, 1983), 283-287. Also, see Boettger, Earthworks, 176-177.

5 Michael Heizer, “Ends of the Earth and Back,” interview by Philipp Kaiser, in Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2012), 17n.

7 Boettger, Earthworks, 228,234-235, 238.

51 rubric under which to gather a major body of work for examination through the lens of historical analysis.

Whereas it is relatively straightforward to point to the late sixties as the genesis of the phenomenon I entitle land art, a more difficult task is determining whether this art form has definitively ended. The period spanning the late sixties to the early eighties was a heyday of intense activity in the field of in situ landscape art. While some of the artists active in this era, such as Vazan and Reitzenstein, continue to make art in the outdoors in the early 21st century, other individuals withdrew from the art scene, such as Ellis. NETCo produced a seminal body of works which could be considered land art within an eclectic oeuvre otherwise not solely devoted to landscape.

Added to the difficulties of defining Canadian land art is the controversy over its status as genuine landscape art, a genre traditionally associated in Western culture with painting and other two-dimensional forms of representation intended for viewing by a stationary beholder. The rise of land art coincided with what some art world commentators perceived as the waning of the grand tradition of landscape painting. Despite this uncertainty over the continued existence and relevance of landscape painting, no consensus was reached as to whether the proliferation of contemporary forms of landscape art might constitute a legitimate development in, descendent of, or substitute for the established landscape genre. Land art’s position in a longer artistic lineage proved difficult to define. In 1973, by which time land art had been present on the art scene for about five years, literary scholar Northrop Frye surprisingly announced the demise of landscape art in his time, conceding that only a “sense of sublimated landscape” persisted, exemplified by the abstract paintings of Jean-Paul Riopelle.8 It is difficult to attribute definitively Frye’s statement to either an unawareness of recent landscape art or a categorical

8 Northrop Frye, “The Canadian Scene: Explorers and Observers,” 3. 52 refusal to recognize anything other than painting as genuine landscape. R. H. Hubbard, curator at the National Gallery in Ottawa, echoed Frye’s implicit identification of landscape with painting, concluding that “National landscape now [by 1973] seems a dead issue.” He pondered resignedly that “Whether [landscape] is simply a memory to be trotted out in whimsy, or whether latent in our art and waiting to be liberated, is something only the future can tell.”9 (Frye and Hubbard neither acknowledged their omission of current forms of landscape art nor did they justify their unstated privileging of the legitimacy of painting. These authors also neglected to mention the

1970s landscape paintings of William Kurelek, Ivan Eyre, and Greg Curnoe.) In stark rebuttal, curator Roald Nasgaard declared in 1976 that the abundance of new experimental variants of landscape emerging over the past decade, including land art, undoubtedly heralded a “rigourous period” of renewed vitality for a genre elastically amenable to all media.10

A look at the Canadian art historical context of the late 1960s confirms Nasgaard’s pronouncement. This was a burgeoning episode in landscape history during which artists, curators, and critics refashioned both the appearance of sites and the act of looking through a range of media other than painting, as displayed by the following exhibitions and publications, many of which featured land artists alongside more conceptually oriented artists and photographers. The seminal Four Artists was held in 1970 at the Fine Arts Gallery of the

University of British Columbia. This exhibit included Jeff Wall’s Landscape Manual (also discussed in Chapter Two), a book of casual, grainy, black-and-white snapshots and type-written text instigating a tension amongst mobile, arrested, and mirrored forms of seeing urban and

9 R. H. Hubbard, “Landscape Painting in Canada,” 29.

10 Roald Nasgaard, “Roots and Promises,” in Changing Visions: The Canadian Landscape, A Travelling Exhibition (Edmonton: Edmonton Art Gallery; Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1976), 12.

53 suburban landscapes through car windows.11 At the same exhibit, Duane Lunden’s conceptual mapping project, The Locator, invited viewers to contemplate the differing perceptual possibilities of, and interactions between, inspecting maps, diagrams, and grids of sites, on one hand, versus directly visiting a geographical site, on the other.12 Lunden thus staged a dialectic reminiscent of Smithson’s 1968 series of “sites” and “non-sites.” In an insightful review, Dennis

Wheeler wrote in 1970 that “One’s obvious initial reaction to the show is that there is a new sense of landscape, a sudden heat for the mundane suburban city” and the “urban-industrial wilderness.”13 The complexity of sight in these works struck Wheeler. He pointed out that

“Wall’s interest is . . . in the visible,” such as “the path of vision as it scans material” in banal scenery. Lunden’s Locator traced a cartographic “frame . . . of a moment caught in space.”14

The journal Artscanada subsequently published two special issues surveying new practices of visualizing and representing sites through diverse media and technologies. All the land artists examined in this study appeared in those volumes. The “On Maps and Mapping” issue from the spring of 1974 presented recent experimentations with borders, grids, time zones, and other landscape features visually condensed and pictorially schematized through cartographic conventions. The “Landforms” issue (1977) showcased works depicting and deconstructing topographical features and landscape motifs.15 The National Gallery of Canada

11 See Jeff Wall, Landscape Manual (Vancouver: Fine Arts Gallery, University of British Columbia, 1969, 1970).

12 See Duane Lunden, “The Locator (1969),” in Free Media Bulletin 1, eds. Duane Lunden, Jeff Wall, and Ian Wallace (Vancouver: 1969), n.p., I. K. Barber Learning Centre, University of British Columbia, Vancouver. The Locator appeared in this publication prior to being displayed in Four Artists.

13 Dennis Wheeler, “The Limits of the Defeated Landscape: A Review of Four Artists Fine Arts Gallery, University of B.C. February 1970,” Artscanada 27 (June 1970): 51. The other two participants in this exhibit were Ian Wallace and Tom Burrows.

14 Ibid., 51.

15 See Artscanada 31 (Spring 1974), “On Maps and Mapping,” and Artscanada 34 (May/June 1977), “Landforms.” 54 hosted New Landscapes in 1974, featuring fifteen Canadians working in various media, including NETCo’s Iain Baxter and Reinhard Reitzenstein.16 A dozen Canadians, including

Reitzenstein, Mackenzie, Michael Snow, and Jackie Winsor, participated in the wide-ranging A

Response to the Environment at the Rutgers University Art Gallery in 1975.17 In 1976, two optically titled exhibitions, 17 Canadian Artists: A Protean View, shown at the Vancouver Art

Gallery, and the comprehensive traveling exhibition, Changing Visions: The Canadian

Landscape, displayed contemporary works embracing innovative modes of landscape (amongst other genres) through land art, performance, photography, and mixed-media sculpture.18

Notwithstanding prior terminological confusion and the haziness of discourses of late

20th-century landscape, my study strategically retains the category of land art. I begin with the basic sense of this term—to be fleshed out progressively throughout this chapter—as site- specific, usually ephemeral, art created in outdoor environments, whether farmland, wilderness, cities, or suburbs, and constructed from local plants, stones, earth, and on occasion, temporarily installed artificial objects. The site’s visual appearance, topography, landmarks, skyline, and climate also form part of a land artwork. A performative quality imbues the making and viewing of land art. Documentary media used by land artists include photography, drawing, maps, video, and narrative texts.

I employ “land art” for the following reasons. Unlike US artists, Canadian artists and critics did not adopt “earthworks” or show a marked preference for earth above other substances.

16 See New Landscapes (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1974).

17 See Jeffrey Wechsler, A Response to the Environment (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Art Gallery, 1975).

18 17 Canadian Artists: A Protean View (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1976) and Changing Visions: The Canadian Landscape, A Travelling Exhibition (Edmonton: Edmonton Art Gallery; Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1976).

“Land,” however, possesses historical and cultural relevancy as it has been employed in writings by and about, as well as in interviews with, Vazan, Mackenzie, Ellis, and later, Marlene Creates.

Suggestive of a work which embraces land as theme, surface of inscription, physical support, and general environment as opposed to a specific medium, land art flexibly encompasses creations as diverse as the N.E. Thing Co.’s planting signs in the North Pole, Vazan tramping patterns in sand and snow, Reitzenstein uprooting trees or sitting naked in a forest, Mackenzie vigourously slicing stones, and Ellis meticulously balancing logs on the shore before the coming of the tide.

The adaptability of the term enables one to incorporate practices overlooked or not previously recognized as landscape-related, to evaluate the prior exclusion of such works, and to reassess the limits of landscape art. “Earthworks” lacks comparable malleability.

“Land art” also aptly retains a vestige of the complex etymology and usages of

“landscape” underpinned by both visual and site-specific implications. Originating from the

Dutch landschap, landscape is an ambiguous designation. The term refers to both an entire artistic genre and an individual two-dimensional representation of natural scenery, while the art of landscaping comprises the planning, remodeling, and beautification of a physical place, such as a garden or park. Depending on the context of its usage, landscape can designate an immersive environment to be physically entered by the body or a distanced object of optical appreciation, an expanse “such as can be taken in at a glance from one point of view.” In the latter case, the landscape as target of the glance is synonymous with the equally visually laden nouns “vista,”

“view,” “scenery,” and “prospect.”19 Landscape possesses an inherently scopic dimension in

Western culture. The ambiguous dichotomy of landscape as location and image is central to land artists’ orchestration of a collapse of site through seeing devices.

19 Oxford English Dictionary, 1989 ed., s.v. “landscape.” 56

Their devices hark to early modern European optical apparatuses for observing scenery.

Replicating neither the exact forms nor the functions of these historical antecedents, land artists liberally reworked earlier devices and their associated visual effects. These historical inventions may be divided into, on one hand, instruments for scientific experiments with light and optics, such as Johannes Kepler’s camera obscura of the early 17th century, and, on the other hand, illusionistic theatrical representations of landscape for popular entertainment, as in the late 18th- century Eidophusikon or the 19th-century panorama and diorama.20 On the subject of 19th-century optical devices, scholar of visual culture Jonathan Crary made an observation applicable to the improvised seeing contraptions of Canadian land art, such as the works of Lee-Nova, Bowers, and Vazan. Crary noted that optical devices drew attention to sight as being not a receptive, mechanical faculty but a mediated, temporal process susceptible to techniques of “modification and control” that impact the visual appearance of perceived objects,21 and by extension, of sites.

Situating Sites

Although the term “land art” seemingly bespeaks of artworks located in, and preoccupied with, landscapes, I nevertheless retain the term “site” to designate the settings and subject matter of land artworks. A pragmatic reason for using “site” is its continued circulation in scholarly research on site-specific art made or displayed in outdoor locations. The term finds ample justification in the widespread employment of “site” by artists, critics, curators, and scholars of the late 1960s and 1970s to refer to the settings of land art and earthworks. In the art world discourse of the era, the adaptable “site” surfaced in the now oft-quoted “site selection,” “site

20 On Kepler’s camera obscura and landscape drawing, see Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 49-51. On the history of illusion and optical devices in European landscape art, see Mark Roskill, The Languages of Landscape (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1997), 80-86.

21 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 105. 57 inspection,” “site report,” and the dynamic of “site” and “non-site.” While these appropriations display the linguistic richness of the term, they also cast site as a conceptual, abstract, impersonal category of space. This usage is partially accurate insofar as sites, unlike places, do not immediately connote familiarity, community, or privacy; a home is generally conceived of by its occupants as a place rather than as a site. Moreover, the abstract “site” conveys aesthetic, even historical, neutrality when compared with Western “landscapes” classified as picturesque, sublime, pastoral, wild, or urban. “Site” thus provides a usefully encompassing, fluid category for settings in which to make art.22

Notwithstanding its conceptual flexibility, “site” also possesses specific meanings pertaining to creative labour and visual experience germane to this study. Firstly, a prominent subcategory of geographical sites comprises physical venues and plots of ground for human interventions and projects, as in construction sites, test sites, camp sites, and excavation sites.

Such “worksites” have their aesthetic counterparts in the locations chosen by land artists. In fields, beaches, and forests, artists lug, chop, dig, and assemble materials for their works.

Secondly, akin to excavation and test sites, the sites of land art are physically transformed and subjected to the intellectual inquiries and experiments of artists. Thirdly, the temporary, provisional nature of the camp site and the ever-evolving appearance of the work site as it nears completion accord with the ephemerality of land artworks, the temporary views revealed by viewing devices, and the visible alterations of these views over time. Finally, the homophony and shared connotations of “site” and “sight” (the latter designating both the visual faculty and

22 On sites in artworks of the 1960s by Walter De Maria and Robert Morris, see Jane McFadden, “Toward Site,” Grey Room 27 (Spring 2007): 36-57. James Meyer analyzes site-specific art from minimalism to the 1990s; see Meyer, “Functional Site,” 23-37. Meanwhile, numerous artists and critics of the 1960s and 1970s continued to draw from the vocabulary of landscape aesthetics by employing terms such as “picturesque” or “sublime”; see, for example, Bois, “A Picturesque Stroll around Clara-Clara,” 40-59.

58 that which is seen) aptly capture land artists’ transformations of geographical sites into new views, scenes, and prospects.

Through their viewing devices, land artists also refashioned the concept of “site.” As the subsequent chapters of this dissertation clarify, the visually experienced sites constructed by these artists diverge from the following commonly held assumptions about the essential characteristics of geographical sites: (a) that sites are locatable (at least theoretically), whether on a map, through bodily experience, or with the assistance of technology; (b) that sites have boundaries (however contested or temporary); (c) that the visual appearance of most sites remains generally consistent and stable throughout a specific viewing experience of an individual beholder; and (d) that sites, as distinguished from the living beings and movable objects within them, are generally considered to be fixed in space. In response, some land artists produced viewing devices that generated prospects defying definitive location, demarcation, or differentiation from broader surroundings. Other artists manipulated sight to create visual fluctuations in the appearance, layout, and placement of sites during the beholder’s viewing of the work. Land artists also experimented with presenting views suspended between presence and disappearance. Rather than facilitate visual inspection or showcase scenic panoramas, these viewing devices heighten the frequent dissonance amongst the beholder’s visual, cognitive, and embodied experiences of sites.

Meanwhile, research on land art and earthworks lacks accounts of the development and deployment of site equivalent in comprehensiveness to research on other forms of in situ art, such as minimalism, public art, and installation art. In land art scholarship, site languishes in a confusing indeterminacy as it is often used interchangeably with “place,” “space,”

“environment,” “context,” and “landscape.” The divergences and commonalities amongst these 59 concepts are thus effaced. Site has also not received the degree of attention accorded to the terms with which it is often conflated as illustrated by the diverse studies of the social, political, aesthetic, gendered, geographical, and philosophical aspects of “space” and “place” in the writings of Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Gaston Bachelard, Doreen B. Massey, Marc

Augé, and Edward S. Casey, to name but a few.

Conceptual Strategies and Photographic Documentation

A complete contextual definition capable of encompassing the diverse permutations of visuality and site must recognize the interactions between land and conceptual art. Although entrenched in the form, texture, and weight of objects and substances, land art shared with conceptual art an emphasis on ideas, linguistic constructions, performances, and ephemeral interventions that led to what art critic Lucy R. Lippard famously heralded as the

“dematerialization” of the art object during the late sixties.23 Members of both artistic currents created works in contexts, sites, and institutions outside those of the art world to integrate art more fully with everyday life. Land and conceptual art also represent a departure from the high modernist ideals of the art object as finished, autonomous, and bounded while defying mainstream conventions of the artwork as a beautiful, permanent, and valuable collectable.24 A

23 See John Chandler and Lucy Lippard, “The Dematerialization of Art,” Art International (February 1968): 31- 36, and Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972; A Cross-Reference Book of Information on Some Esthetic Boundaries, ed. Lucy R. Lippard (New York: Praeger, 1973).

24 Collette Garraud and Gilles A. Tiberghien make the argument, disputed by some scholars, that earthwork artists and land artists rejected the art market and expressed similar goals of critiquing and expanding beyond the ideological constraints and social elitism of the network of museums and commercial galleries which had commoditized the art object; see Garraud, L’idée de nature, 8-12, and Tiberghien, Land Art, 61-83.

60 recent comprehensive travelling exhibition of Canadian conceptual art confirmed the conceptual bent of land artists by displaying works by NETCo, Ellis, Mackenzie, and Vazan.25

Perhaps the most significant bond between conceptual and land artists was their probing of the aesthetic possibilities of temporal passage while staving off the effects of the irretrievability of history. Artists of both affiliations relied extensively on practices of documenting and archiving through photographs, maps, diagrams, models, films, administrative forms, and texts to ensure future access to fragile, ephemeral, unrepeatable, or inaccessible objects, events, and actions. Only a limited public could have first-hand experience of land artworks made from materials prone to natural decomposition or erosion in remote or privately owned property, forests, abandoned areas, or semi-rural plots. Documentation not only captured past events of planning and execution but also recorded potential or incomplete projects for future exhibitions and collecting.

The intricate relation between land art and documentary photographs taken by land artists requires further methodological specification. Since Smithson’s formulation of the dialectic of site and non-site, critics and art historians have exhaustively dissected the roles of photographs as records of, substitutes for, or integral components of site-specific works. As subsequent chapters reveal, writings about Canadian art yielded different concerns that form both foundation and foil for this present study. In general, Canadian critics and curators of the late 1960s and

1970s preferred to dissect the photographic nature of these artworks. Although these authors acknowledged the site-specific and often tactile qualities of outdoor, in situ art, their analyses often assumed that these works were primarily created for the camera and the viewer inspecting the photographic record. Critics duly pointed to the artists’ exploiting of photographic effects of

25 See “Artists and Works in the Exhibition,” in Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980, ed. Grant Arnold and Karen Henry (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2012), 151-169. 61 camera angles, framing, and documentary styles, not to mention indoor exhibition formats such as wall displays of serially organized images in galleries. Admittedly, writers’ emphasis on the photographic medium finds support in the innovative visual compositions and aesthetic appeal of many of the photographs taken by land artists of their works amidst scenery not typically portrayed on postcards. However, in scrutinizing documentation, contemporary critical reception neglected other aspects of these complex artworks, the forms of beholding they enlisted, and the types of sites they inhabited and created. Conversely, I analyze the artworks of NETCo, Ellis,

Mackenzie, Reitzenstein, and Vazan as land artworks operating with, but not equivalent to, photography. All the works that I examine were ephemeral yet constructed in public or privately owned outdoor venues physically accessible for varying periods not only to the artists but also to various communities of viewers, ranging from the artists’ associates and families to local towns, commuters, tourists, and, in some cases, international audiences. These works invited diverse forms of embodied, mobile viewing. Photographs and other archival documents confirm that artists conceived of land-works as not only the subject matter of photographs but as three-dimensional, sculptural works to be experienced on location prior to reaching wider audiences through photographic dissemination in galleries, museums, or journals. I examine documentary and archival traces as objects of study to reconstruct imaginatively the making and existence of these land-art viewing devices. Notwithstanding the crucial import of documentary photographs to my analysis, on-site looking at artworks remains my focus. Consequently, I employ “land art” in lieu of “conceptual landscape photography.”

The Canoeman’s Reconnoitering Eye versus Land Art’s Oppositional Sight

I now complete this contextual definition with a comparative analysis pitting the modes of sight explored by land art against the landscape visuality outlined by Northrop Frye in essays 62 published between 1965 and 1973, the period coinciding with the appearance and early proliferation of land art. These writings portray a distinctively Canadian eye that surveyed scenery in the service of political and colonial conquest while also probing iconic landscape representations. Although Frye drew upon artworks from the first half of the 20th century, his ideas are of undeniable interest to the historical moment in which they were written. I present his paradigm of sight neither as a definitive nor monolithic portrayal of modernist landscape art, but as a strategic foil for land art.

In an essay of 1965, Frye postulated that the ocular colonization of “linear distance” was the leitmotif of Canadian history and art. He upheld gazing afar and scanning the horizon as dynamic ocular endeavours to overcome and appropriate vast distances in actual sites. The beholder’s observation of landscape paintings also exemplifies the visual penetration and possession of mysterious, partially hidden, and potentially valuable, frontier territories. In such cases, spatial perspective facilitates optical entry by guiding the viewer into the depths of the scene. As examples, Frye pointed to the vibrantly coloured Northern Ontario landscapes of

Tom Thomson (1877-1917) in which the main visual focus often recedes into the backdrop, such as a “river or a gorge in the hills [which] twists elusively out of sight,”26 as in the manipulation of perspective in Northern River of 1914-15 [figure 5]. Frye also referenced the works of British

Columbian artist Emily Carr (1871-1945) “whose vision is always [. . .] ‘deeper into the forest,’”27 as conveyed by Red Cedar (1931) [figure 6].

The eye’s scanning was not only a vehicle for artistic expression and colonial and economic development but also supposedly manifested a distinctively Canadian sensibility. Frye

26 Frye, “Conclusion,” 828.

27 Ibid., 828.

63 asserted that the eye’s plunge through space recurred in contemporaneous literary depictions of national character and subjectivity. Drawing from Morley Callaghan’s Such is My Beloved

(1934) and W. O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind (1947), Frye pondered that “It would be interesting to know how many Canadian novels associate nobility of character with a faraway look, or base their perorations on a long-range perspective.”28 Canadian media guru Marshall

McLuhan similarly correlated identity with beholding sites. Unlike Frye’s preoccupation with a national perception of distance, depth, and spatial recession, McLuhan rhapsodized over the unique regional gaze enjoyed in the Prairies: “I think of western skies as one of the most beautiful things about the West, and the western horizons. The Westerner doesn’t have a point of view. He has a vast panorama; he has such tremendous space around him.” For McLuhan, the

Prairie-dweller “has at all times a total field of vision” 29 conducive to an open-minded intellect.30

Frye later deftly refined his ideas on the roving eye in an essay of 1973 featured in an exhibition catalogue of Canadian landscape painting. In this second text, Frye focused more intently on the eye’s difficult exploration of frontier terrain riddled with obstacles. Rather than gazing at a site from afar and being drawn gradually into its secret recesses, the mobile eye of the

1973 essay grapples with the complex contents of an unpredictable prospect. Revisiting the

Group of Seven, he proposed this interpretation:

One notices in these paintings how the perspective is so frequently a twisting and scanning perspective, a canoeman’s eye peering around the corner to see what comes next. Thomson . . . uses the conventions of art nouveau to throw up in front of the canvas a fringe of foreground which is rather blurred, because the eye is meant to look past it. It

28 Ibid., 828.

29 Marshall McLuhan, “Marshall McLuhan and Tom Easterbrook,” interview by Danny Finkleman, in Speaking of Winnipeg, ed. John Parr (Winnipeg: Queenston House, 1974), 23.

30 Ibid., 37-38. 64

is a perspective which reminds us how much Canada developed as a passage or gateway to somewhere else being merely an obstruction in itself.31

The canoeman’s visual surveillance and psychological mastery of what lurked “around the corner” were complicit with the expansion of political power.

While retaining the mobile inquisitiveness of the colonial and modernist viewing mapped by Frye, land art redirected the “canoeman’s eye” toward new objects. Whereas the canoeman’s ambitiously far-ranging gaze and apprehensively “twisting” eye attempted to arrive “somewhere else” by overcoming sites relegated to mere passages, gateways, obstacles, and encumbrances, land art emphasized a close, prolonged examination of the process of looking at sites and their contents, the cultural conditions affecting this process, as well as the particularities and histories of locales. By the late sixties, looking at, through, and around sites replaced the previous agenda to “look past” one’s immediate surroundings to “see what comes next.” Three major issues distinguish the ocular preoccupations of the late sixties and seventies from the canoeman paradigm: technology, embodiment, and identity. These subjects do not constitute discrete sub- themes addressed separately in upcoming chapters but are instead general characteristics interwoven throughout the dissertation.32

Frye painted an idealized portrait of a lone traveler privy to an encounter with pristine, seemingly unpopulated wilderness without the necessity of technology. This model of spectatorship omitted the possibility of the canoeman’s being equipped with telescope, compass, and camera, not to mention firearms, in his mission of ocular conquest. Likewise, the viewer of landscape paintings described by Frye may have approached the works of Thomson and Carr

31 Frye, “The Canadian Scene: Explorers and Observers,” 2.

32 For a study of contemporary artists’ and scholars’ rethinking of the Group of Seven tradition, see the following anthology: John O’Brian and Peter White, eds., Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity, and Contemporary Art (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007).

65 through the technological intermediaries of photographic reproductions or slide projections.

Land artists, in contrast, openly made use of technology in the form of cameras, motor vehicles, and farming or construction tools to build and document their seeing devices. As demonstrated by NETCo (Chapter Two), Ellis (Chapter Three), and Vazan (Conclusion), land artists were more likely to be aficionados of cars, motorized vessels, and aircraft, respectively, than canoemen. All land artists embraced the documentary and creative capacities of the camera.

Through photographs, films, slide projections, and vehicles, artists of the sixties and seventies inserted, recorded, and exhibited the traces of their presence in the outdoors, thereby shattering the invisibility of the canoeman who indulges in the privilege of looking but is never seen.

Inversely, artists also investigated how landscape might inspire innovative adaptations of accessible, mainstream technology and common tools. Far from harnessing technology for purely functional means, land art adopted a critical attitude toward the camera by thwarting pretensions of documentary objectivity. Technology thus provided new viewing conditions for art while generating new typologies of scenery and motifs for the late 20th century.

The body’s rigourous participation in the making and constructing of land art comprises the second divergence between the sight of land art and the canoeman’s eye. Frye’s viewer of landscapes real and represented operates as a disembodied, monocular, albeit active, entity. Land artists, however, engaged in often physically strenuous activities to make their works: journeying for long distances, lugging and assembling heavy objects, or digging, chopping, and sawing vigorously. Their completed works also appealed to embodied, mobile sight. Artists coupled the powers of binocular vision with corporeal experience to appropriate, transform, and travel across physical settings. The bodies of the artist and viewer act as interfaces between the dual roles of landscape as image and as physical site while locating sight and perspective. 66

The third distinction between the canoeman’s scanning and land art’s seeing consists of identity, and more specifically, cultural and gendered identities. The canoeman emerges as a

Euro-Canadian beholder ironically defined by his appropriation of a vessel from the indigenous peoples of Canada. Land art underscored that site and viewing are historically specific, non- universal categories neither politically neutral nor uniformly experienced by all subjects. In contrast to the commanding, covetous gaze of the European explorer, Ellis, Mackenzie, and

Reitzenstein acknowledged discomfort and anxiety over the colonialist legacy of injustices and violence committed by Euro-Canadians against First Nations peoples and their lands in the name of economic expansion and political conquest, issues which I address in the chapters dealing with these artists. Land art could not avoid raising questions about conflicts over land as property, natural resource, and foundation of cultural heritage. Ambivalence toward nationalism and colonialism marks the works and ideas of Ellis, Mackenzie, Reitzenstein, and Vazan. As revealed by their art and activism, these artists refused to feign moral and emotional distance from the country’s past or its post-centennial culture. Some land artists, furthermore, drew inspiration from First Nations material cultures, technologies, and histories. As Chapter Five points out, Reitzenstein collaborated with indigenous community leaders and healers on some of his artworks. Although artists referenced and paid homage to native cultures, they did not presumptuously attempt to pass themselves off as possessing an authoritative understanding of these cultures. Artists acknowledged their Euro-Canadian heritage.

Gendered identity also shaped land art. With the exception of Emily Carr’s visual prowess, the canoeman and the beholder of landscape paintings described by Frye was a masculine figure optically penetrating and possessing a landscape. Likewise, McLuhan identified the broad-minded “Westerner” of the Prairies as “he.” In the history of landscape art, nature has 67 traditionally been branded as the passive, unthinking, fertile female other opposed to the supremacy and intellect of culture gendered as male. By the 1970s, women’s eyes and bodies vied with their male counterparts as attested by the outdoor works of Canadians Ingrid Baxter (of the N.E. Thing Co.), Françoise Sullivan, Carole Itter, and Marlene Creates. During the 1960s, women, including gallery owner Virginia Dwan and critic and curator Lucy Lippard, were active as patrons, curators, and critics affiliated with the male artists of earthworks and British land art.

The rarity of female artists in either scene was the status quo. However, this situation altered drastically as the seventies wore on, as women emerged as a visible contingent in site-specific, outdoor art, most notably Nancy Holt, Alice Aycock, Agnes Denes, Ana Mendieta, Mary Miss, and Patricia Johanson.33 Although men dominated land art in Canada, I bring their works into continual dialogue with artworks and writings by women artists, critics, interviewers, and curators.

33 For an introduction to women as artists and patrons in postmodern landscape art, see the following: Laura Roulet, “Ana Mendieta and Carl Andre: Duet of Leaf and Stone,” Art Journal 63 (Fall 2004): 80-101; Barbara Matilsky, Fragile Ecologies (New York: Rizzoli, 1992); Suzaan Boettger, “Behind the Earth Movers,” Art in America (April 2004): 54-63; Boettger, Earthworks, 147-148; Boettger, “Excavating Land Art by Women in the 1970s: Discoveries and Oversights,” Sculpture 27 (November 2008): 38-45; Jeffrey Kastner, “Preface,” in Land and Environmental Art, ed. Jeffrey Kastner, survey by Brian Wallis (London: Phaidon Press, 1998), 15-16.

CHAPTER ONE: FIGURES 5, 6

Images were removed due to copyright restrictions.

Figure 5. Tom Thomson, Northern River, 1914-15. Oil on canvas. 114.3 cm x 101.6 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

Figure 6. Emily Carr, Red Cedar, 1931. Oil on canvas. Vancouver Art Gallery. 69

CHAPTER TWO. ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS: THE VEHICULAR FRAMES OF THE N.E. THING COMPANY, 1969

Automobile Landscapes

The publication in 1969 of a new edition of art historian Kenneth Clark’s book

Landscape into Art (1949) proved to be a timely event for land art in the late sixties. In this book,

Clark claimed that the concept of landscape had broadened irrevocably in the modern era thanks to both the closer and more distant ranges of vision made perceptible by technological devices such as the microscope and telescope.1 His comment implicitly pointed to the emergence of sites filtered through viewing apparatuses and divested of the materiality conventionally attributed to geographical places. By “materiality,” I refer to the tangibility, earthiness, and fixity commonly expected of physical outdoor sites presumed to be comprised of three-dimensional forms with textured surfaces through which one walks, moves, and breathes. However, the sites alluded to by Clark complicate such immersive and embodied experience. Neither can the body easily enter these places nor can the human subject immediately perceive such sites through touch, hearing, smell, or taste. Technologically assisted sight comprises the principal means by which these intangible places are manifested.

In Canada, coinciding with the year of the re-issuing of Landscape into Art, the concept of the non-material site mediated by viewing devices found expression in the land artworks of the Vancouver-based collaborative, the N.E. Thing Company (NETCo). NETCo consisted of married partners Iain Baxter (b. 1936, Middlesborough, England) and Ingrid Baxter (Elaine

Hieber, b. 1938, Spokane, Washington). Appropriating a corporate business structure of which the artists were co-presidents, the Company was officially incorporated in 1969 and dissolved in

1978 following the Baxters’ divorce. NETCo conceived and created land art as early as 1965,

1 Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art (London: John Murray, 1949; Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 140. Page references are to the 1969 edition. 70 pre-dating the earliest American earthworks.2 Inspired by abstract, visually experienced categories of site, such as views, prospects, scenes, vistas, and panoramas, the Baxters’ land art differed greatly from earthwork artists’ preferences for gritty, pungent humus, desert sand, and colossal rock formations.

This chapter addresses NETCo’s creation of non-material, intangible sites in conceptual land artworks from 1969 centered on viewing devices in the form of frames. These frames both oriented and occasionally disoriented the viewer’s sight to impact the appearance and possible meanings of a given site. I argue that through framing apparatuses, NETCo defied common expectations of site-specific materiality and fixity by generating ungraspable, mutable sites contingent upon the act of seeing. Artistic interventions in the outdoors challenged the viewer’s ability to enter an embodied experience informed by all of the senses. The artists’ work resisted the romanticized ideal of a site as reassuringly coherent and available to direct experience as put forth by Northrop Frye’s characterization of the dense forests and winding rivers awaiting the canoeman’s hungry gaze. Hence, framed viewing catalyzed the figurative dissolution of sites and culminated in the formulation of a more abstract model of site informed by the cultural contexts of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The Company’s co-presidents delved into permutations of seeing and sites particular to the North American cultural climate in which they worked. To realize this endeavour, the artists turned to the automobile, an accessible technology permeating popular culture, everyday life, and geographies urban and rural. Concurrently, the Baxters’ embrace of driving as an artistic practice fuelled their interest in the unique sites produced by, and for, car culture and road travel.

2 Photographs sent by Iain Baxter to New York critic Lucy R. Lippard (and now preserved in the Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution) indicate that NETCo’s first land art projects are dated from 1965. See James Nisbet, “Coast to Coast: Land Work between the N.E. Thing Co. and Lucy Lippard,” Archives of American Art Journal 47: 1-2 (Spring 2008): 61. 71

The roadside site, which architects Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi referred to in 1970 as the “roadside environment” or “automobile landscape,” had become a staple across North

America by the 1960s as embodied in the extensive network of camping grounds, scenic routes, scenic lookouts, drive-in restaurants and churches, motels, trailer parks, and parking lots.3

Roadsides also include embankments and adjacent plantings. Although NETCo’s inclusion of technology and its associated sites in installations was seemingly at variance with the organic materials of which land artworks are usually constructed, the Company’s members distilled contemporary currents in international land art by approaching the roadside site as a found object incorporated into an artwork.

Framing devices made this artistic reclamation possible by displaying the site as a work intended for viewing by all motorists driving down the road.4 Significantly, my analysis underlines NETCo’s borrowing of two framing items from the paraphernalia of 20th-century automotive transport—the car window and the road sign.5 Since the elaboration of one-point

3 Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, “The Highway,” in The Highway (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, in association with the University of Pennsylvania, 1970), 12. The authors, along with Steven Izenour, also co-authored the influential book Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972). While I focus on the intersection of Canadian land art with automobile culture and transportation, the following books address the roles of tourism, travel, and mobility in American earth art: Suzanne Paquet, Le paysage façonné: les territoires postindustriels, l’art et l’usage (Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2009); Anne-Françoise Penders, En chemin, le land art, vol. 1, Partir (Brussels: Lettre volée, 1999); Penders, En chemin, le land art, vol. 2, Revenir (Brussels: Lettre volée, 1999).

4 As expressed through their land art, the members of NETCo were more interested in exploring the intersection of car culture and the visual culture of the sixties than with advocating specific environmentalist concerns about the impact of the automobile on Canadian landscapes. The artists’ approach, however, appears to have been deliberately chosen as NETCo was acquainted with ecological concepts and methods. Iain Baxter had studied ecology and graduated in 1959 with a bachelor’s degree in zoology from the University of Idaho where he had illustrated scientific publications. See Ian Baxter, Curriculum Vitae, undated, N.E. Thing Co. Artist File, 1965-1975, Vancouver Art Gallery Library and Archives.

5 For the sake of coherence, I omit the mirror, an optical framing device that recurs in minimalist and conceptual art and figures prominently in critics’ writings and scholarly literature. Marie L. Fleming discusses the plethora of mirrors in NETCo’s oeuvre in Baxter²: Any Choice Works 1965-1970 (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1982), 59, 76. The Baxters’ use of mirrors roughly coincided with Bruce McLean’s Mirror Work of 1969 and Gary Lee-Nova’s Mirror/Waterfall (October 1969). In 1971, General Idea created numerous performances with mirrors in outdoor public spaces that the artists documented in video and photographs such as Double Mirror Video, Light On, and, in 72 perspective during the Renaissance, the window has represented the quintessential visual framing strategy of Western art. In his treatise Della pittura (On Painting) of 1436, the Italian architect and mathematician Leon Battista Alberti invoked the image of the window frame as a guide for establishing the relative scale of human figures represented in a geometrically ordered, painted image.6 Meanwhile, NETCo adopted road signs as a framing strategy by installing placards as bookends and cut-off points to delimit a designated parcel of roadside turf as an in situ artwork distinct from the surrounding territory. The signs also staked out and bracketed the motorist- viewer’s durational experience of that particular tract of land.

My examination of NETCo’s drive-by dismantling of the materiality of the roadside site begins with a presentation of the main artwork to be discussed, the Quarter-Mile N.E. Thing Co.

Landscape (1969). The chapter then unfolds across the following four stages. I first analyze the artists’ creation of an intangible “view” through window frames, a theme intertwined with the history of modern transportation technology. The subsequent section addresses the shifting appearance of the view and its role in sixties art and culture. Next, the chapter approaches

collaboration with Image Bank, Fire/Mirror/Landscape. On Robert Smithson’s experiments with reflective surfaces and glass during his stay in Vancouver during 1969 to 1970, see Grant Arnold, “Robert Smithson in Vancouver: A Fragment of a Greater Fragmentation,” in Robert Smithson in Vancouver: A Fragment of a Greater Fragmentation (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2003), 9-30. For an analysis of Robert Morris’s minimalist mirrored cube sculptures, see Nick Kaye, Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation (New York: Routledge, 2000), 26-30. Michael Turner reflects upon the use of glass and mirrors in Vancouver art from the 1960s to the 21st century in “Glass and Mirrors,” in Intertidal: Vancouver Art and Artists (Vancouver: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, in association with the University of British Columbia; Antwerp: Antwerp Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005), 16-29. Although the car’s rear-view mirror is not central to my discussion of NETCo, Vancouver photo-conceptual art repeatedly portrayed this object, as in Jeff Wall’s Landscape Manual (1969-1970), Ian Wallace’s untitled series of photographs of traffic and buildings in Vancouver of 1969-1970, and Christos Dikeakos’s Instant Photo Information (1969-1970). Other examples of the rear-view mirror in photographs of roads from this era include Bill Vazan’s Route 37 (1970), Lee Friedlander’s Idaho (1972), Peter Gnass’s Progression in Three Times (1977), and Eldon Garnet’s book of photos, maps, and text entitled Spiraling (1979). For a sampling of artists working on or representing the road and the automobile, see Roadrunners (Montreal: Vox centre de l’image contemporaine, 2009).

6 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and Sculpture [Della pittura], trans. Cecil Grayson (1435; repr., London: Phaidon, 1972), 67.

73 viewers’ creative interactions with NETCo’s road signs. The final section locates the artists’ contribution to debates of the late sixties in the nascent field of environmental perception studies.

Start Viewing

In preparation for this chapter, I now recreate the viewer’s route through the main artwork under analysis, the Quarter-Mile N.E. Thing Co. Landscape executed in the summer of

1969 along a rural road in Prince Edward Island. The sole remnants of the Quarter-Mile are three colour-tinted photographs taken by the artists while driving in a car, in addition to a map and polychrome sketch indicating the general location of the work in the western part of the island

[figures 7-10]. The original work, comprised of three road signs, a stretch of gravel road, and the adjacent tract of land, offers a site-specific visual spectacle completed by the participation of a mobile audience beholding the work through car windows and between road signs. Throughout the drive, these framing devices direct the mobile subject’s visual attention toward a seemingly banal patch of farmland which becomes less of a place to visit than a distanced view and spectacle to behold. The encounter with the site begins when unsuspecting motorists, passing a field bounded by a dense boscage, approach a small, generic, white sign on a post by the side of the road. Erected at the junction of the gravel and a wide grassy band distancing vehicles from the field, the sign is strategically angled for viewing by passengers on the contiguous side of the route. To habitual users of this thoroughfare, the object is an unfamiliar intrusion and resembles neither a commercial billboard advertisement nor a notice for a local business or tourist attraction, let alone a standard traffic sign. Drivers and passengers read the following enigmatic, deadpan proclamation painted on the sign in thick, black, uppercase letters: “YOU WILL SOON

PASS BY A ¼ MILE N.E. THING CO. LANDSCAPE.” 74

After a few moments, the occupants of the vehicles are then confronted by a second, smaller, white sign bearing the puzzlingly vague command to “START VIEWING” in a larger, bold font. The mysterious signs taunt those unfamiliar with the playful art of NETCo as to whether this “landscape” is a work of art, an ironic hoax, or a real estate ploy. Several more suspenseful moments ensue during which drivers and passengers, their curiosity piqued or suspicion aroused by the resolutely ambiguous signs, inspect the site so conspicuously pointed out. Some occupants of the vehicle cast intrigued or skeptical glances while others strain their eyes in anticipation of an event or anomaly in the field. The car windows continuously delimit a geometric scenery of unbroken, parallel stretches of grey road, yellowing grass, green plants, and a wall of trees standing against the blue sky. Motorists might spot farm workers, birds in flight, the occasional hitchhiker, or no visible signs of activity. Thus far, other than the placards, nothing appears out of place. After a quarter of a mile of crops and clouds streaming past windows and hovering in rear- and side-view mirrors, the mounting suspense is abruptly shattered. A third and final sign orders onlookers to “STOP VIEWING.” No further signs loom above the dashboard and no other perceptible change occurs in the field. The staging of the

Company landscape thus concludes with an ambiguous anticlimax.

As suggested by documents used in the planning of the PEI work, the artists chose this particular automobile landscape as it afforded an uncluttered vista easily beheld in its entirety through multiple window frames in motion. The Baxters attended closely to the logistical details of the work. A road map of PEI consulted by the artists in 1969 (not illustrated here), currently stored in the Art Gallery of Ontario, confirms that the artists sought professional expertise to find a suitable location. Notes scribbled on the map refer to Neil Fleming, identified as “chief surveyor,” alongside his contact information. Fleming’s advice apparently guided the artists as a 75 pair of geographical coordinates jotted down on the road map situate the work with greater precision than the provincial map [figure 10] appended to the three photographs. The coordinates correspond approximately to the point of intersection of two lines traced on the road which plots the artwork in farmland slightly south of Highway Two and near or possibly along Route 227, a graveled road passing by the towns of Clyde and Hartsville.7 Guided by Fleming, NETCo selected a relatively unpopulated locale devoid of either landmarks or architecture (except for a nearby farmer’s house) and marked by minimal commercial or traffic signage. By planting the road signs, NETCo cordoned off a venue ideally suited for unobstructed, mobile viewing along an uninterrupted linear path of uniform flatness.

In the stripped-down viewing conditions of this site, the Quarter-Mile signs sprung up as prominent landmarks in the visual field of motorists otherwise undistracted by extraneous cues or unfamiliar landmarks. With their attention momentarily diverted by the road signs flanking the view through the windows, beholders were made aware of the mental and perceptual activities elicited during their interaction with the work. Throughout 1969, NETCo repeatedly used the quarter-mile view as a general framing format, standard unit of measurement, and territorial division applicable to the viewing of diverse sites. Apart from the PEI work, two similar installations using the same signs were set up along roads in Newport Beach in Balboa, south of

Los Angeles, and in Irvine, California, as commissions for traveling exhibitions.8 In each of

7 The coordinates written on the map are 46°20’ N, 63°26’ W. See road map of Prince Edward Island, Prince Edward Island Travel Bureau, Charlottetown, 1969, Unit General – 5, 1969, Box 10, File 2, Iain Baxter Fonds CA OTAG SC064, E.P. Taylor Research Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

8 The Baxters executed the first California work on MacArthur Road and Coast Highway at the Newport Centre of Newport Beach, Balboa, south of Los Angeles, for The New Art of Vancouver organized by the Newport Harbor Art Museum in 1969 and also displayed at the University of California, Santa Barbara. See Newport Harbor Art Museum press release, “‘New Art of Vancouver’ Exhibition Includes Work by Iain Baxter, President of N.E. Thing Co., Ltd. on Ten Acre Newport Center Land,” October 9, 1969, N.E. Thing Co. Artist File, 1965-1975, Vancouver Art Gallery Library and Archives. For the second work, the artists planted signs along Bonita Canyon Road, in 76 these works, the artists’ economical intervention transmuted a roadside site into an in situ artwork, thus refashioning the act of looking out of a car window during the daily commute or weekend drive into an aesthetic visual experience. In response to NETCo’s repeated call to “start viewing,” the following section rethinks the geographical setting of the roadside in PEI as an intangible image mediated by frames.

Passing Views

The viewing prompted by the text on NETCo’s road signs and cropped by the edges of car windows produces a particular category of non-material site: the view. Defined as an “area covered by the eye,” the “view” is equivalent to other places experienced visually including the

“sight,” “prospect,” or “scene.” “View” also encompasses any two-dimensional representation of scenery.9 Although similar to certain definitions of “landscape,” “view” signals more explicitly the role of sight in the subject’s encounter with a location. In light of the view’s multiple meanings, the PEI road signs’ instructions to “start” and “stop viewing” dilute the materiality of the field in the following two ways, first, by designating the site as a sight to be beheld rather than a place to be entered, and second, by reinforcing the picture-like appearance of the roadside displayed through the car windows. In the NETCo work, a quotidian visual phenomenon mutates into a threshold between place and image. Furthermore, this section maintains that NETCo’s conception of the view drew upon culturally specific ways of seeing which came to the fore in

Western art in the sixties while evoking older practices of seeing from the history of landscape art. Emphasizing both the uniqueness and historicity of roadside viewing, this section hones in on the artists’ construction of the intangible image-site through framing in these areas: semantic

Irvine, for the extensive exhibit The Highway shown in Philadelphia, Houston, and Akron in 1970. See The Highway (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, in association with the University of Pennsylvania, 1970).

9 Oxford English Dictionary, 1989 ed., s.v. “view, n.” 77 cues and visual framing effects in the Quarter-Mile work as well as the place of NETCo’s appropriation of car windows within a longer history of optical framing devices.

In NETCo’s display of the site as a view, reading the text on the road signs precedes beholding the scenery delimited by the windows. As textual frames, the bold black lettering on the small, nondescript, white boards directs motorists’ attention to the field. The linguistic construction of the view begins with the carefully chosen language on the first sign marking the outer limit of the work, “YOU WILL SOON PASS BY A ¼ MILE N.E. THING CO.

LANDSCAPE.” The ostensibly straightforward phrasing of this sentence wavers ambiguously between a statement of fact and an urgent order issued to the individual beholder singled out as

“you.” Whether interpreted as declarative or imperative, the first three words pull one’s gaze through the window and thus bring the approaching site into view. The subsequent two words on the same sign specify the conditions for seeing the Company landscape. “Pass” and its accompanying preposition “by” define the subject’s interaction with the site in relation to movement, proximity, distance, and time. In short, “passing” construes the roadside vis à vis the body as well as the eyes of the motorist. Within this relationship, the site emerges as a visual, nebulous entity evading a fully embodied experience. “Passing by” denotes an arc of movement during which the subject avoids, misses, or simply moves beyond a given target, in this case, the site. To “pass by” is also synonymous with paying a brief visit. Although the words suggest the act of approaching, any physical closeness between vehicle and automobile landscape is momentary. Alternately, the sign’s language implies the transience of the subject’s presence near the site by evoking the mortality of all bodies destined to “pass on” or “away.” In underscoring that “you will soon pass by” but not “through” or “along” the quarter-mile, the artists emphasize the physical distance, however slight, separating the beholder from the roadside. Such a gap 78 indicates an inability (or unwillingness) to psychologically or intellectually invest oneself in this momentary encounter. The motorist perceives the field primarily through sight.

The passersby’s physical and emotional disconnectedness from the Quarter-Mile contrasts strikingly with the immersive, multisensory experiences of site quested after by land artist Richard Long. Many of his works from the 1960s and 1970s consisted of solitary walks in the outdoors ranging from brief strolls to long-distance treks documented in photographs, notes, and maps. During his rambles, the British artist crafted what critic Rudolf Herman Fuchs described as “an intensification of perception” of sites through walking.10 Such perceptual experience also brings to mind embodied, tactile interventions in outdoor sites by other international land and earth artists of the late sixties and seventies—Robert Smithson’s amble along the Spiral Jetty, the beholder’s walk around and through Richard Serra’s outdoor sculptures, Nils-Udo’s giant nests capable of sheltering a human being, Michael Heizer’s rock and earthen constructions dwarfing the beholder, Ana Mendieta’s “earth-body” series of

Volcanoes and Siluetas.

Compared with the hiker ambulating for hours while buffeted by the elements or the artist’s body cradled in earth and branches, the sedentary driver or passenger in PEI possesses a more restricted sensorial experience of landscape mediated by a protective framework of glass panes and a weighty chassis. As both a solid barrier and a permeable filter between subject and site, the framing structure of the vehicle encourages a primarily visual engagement with outdoor scenery while heightening other forms of sensorial awareness of the body’s immediate environs.

This distinction between the subject’s viewing of external scenery and multi-sensorial immersion in interior surroundings widens the divergence between the site and the passerby. Cocooned

10 Rudolf Herman Fuchs, “Dartmoor,” in Richard Long (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd.; New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1986), 99. 79 inside the vehicle, the viewer sits amidst warmth or coolness, mingling smells, mechanical vibrations, sounds from the radio, and passengers’ chatter. Rolling past the site, the body sustains contact with upholstery against clothing and skin, the seat cushions the head, trunk, and legs, the steering wheel is firm in the driver’s grip, and the pedals remain solid beneath the feet.

Following up on the first sign’s promise of a fleeting ocular experience, the remaining two placards bracketing the quarter-mile stretch introduce the concept of “viewing” and thus identify the site as a “view.” Although the initial sign proclaims the location as a “landscape,” the term “view” is a more precise designation for a place perceived primarily through sight.

NETCo’s preference for the semantic nuances of the “view” and its implications for the re- definition of site find confirmation in private correspondence pertaining to another version of the quarter-mile work. In a letter of June 13, 1969 addressed to Iain Baxter, the writer, Thomas H.

Garver, director of the Newport Harbor Art Museum in California, responded to ideas previously discussed with the artists. Garver approved of NETCo’s “thoughts about signs placed at critical points” and expressed special interest in commissioning “a series of N.E. Thing Co.’s sponsored

‘views’ or anti-views.”11 Although it is unclear as to whether the artists or the museum director coined the “views” and “anti-views” pairing, the terms re-invent Smithson’s site and non-site dialectic in ocular terms and underscore the centrality of sight in NETCo’s site-specific art.

NETCo’s interest in roadside viewing in 1969 as a culturally defined activity, assisted by framing devices, finds additional evidence amongst the artists’ notes. On both sides of a manila envelope postmarked July 5, 1969 in Vancouver and addressed to “Mr. J. Baxter,” NETCo scribbled a slew of brief, hand-written slogans and orders, many pertaining to various kinds of ocular acts. The scrawled notes include the following: “look,” “look for anything,” “eye

11 Thomas H. Garver, letter to Iain Baxter, June 13, 1969, Correspondence 1969, Box 10, File 5, Iain Baxter Fonds CA OTAG SC064, E.P. Taylor Research Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

80 anything,” “observe anything,” “eyes look here,” “eyes don’t look here,” “don’t ever look here,”

“see more,” “look see do,” “look seen,” and so on. Boxes are drawn around many of the captions such that the envelope resembles a field chaotically dappled with miniature road signs.12 As suggested by the text on the signs planted in PEI, the artists selected “viewing” from the terms above as both the lynchpin of the beholder’s engagement with the work and the process by which a particular kind of framed site comes into being through the windows. In refashioning the site as a framed view offered as an artistic image and an intriguing spectacle, the artists affirmed the cultural and aesthetic connotations particular to viewing. The terminology of the road signs implicitly glosses the framed view in the cultural vocabularies of art appreciation and criticism, landscape painting and aesthetics, and garden history. Moreover, a “viewer” is one who not only appreciates art but also consumes other visual forms of popular entertainment such as television or film, thus overlapping with the “beholder” and “spectator.” Such cultural underpinnings distinguish viewing from other terms dashed down on the envelope and similar verbs not mentioned, such as the generalized acts of looking and seeing, the potentially erotic gestures of eyeing, glancing, and ogling, as well as the regulatory, disciplinary, military, and policing procedures of observing, surveying, reconnoitering, spying, and watching.

The aesthetic view presaged by the signs is realized in car windows that further undermine the solidity of the forms and objects flashing past the vehicle. The edges of each window crop and display the content of the view as a distant picture, thus performing the basic functions of a frame around a painting, specifically, a landscape painting. 13 Iain Baxter

12 NETCo, notes on manila envelope, 1969, Unit General - 6, 1969, Box 10, File 3, Iain Baxter Fonds CA OTAG SC064, E.P. Taylor Research Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

13 On the significance of frames in visual art, see Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), Louis Marin, “Du cadre au décor ou la question de l’ornement dans la peinture,” Rivista di estetica 12 (1982): 16-35, and Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, “Starting Out From 81 correlated beholding the Quarter-Mile series with aesthetically appreciating landscape. Asserting that “The entire physical landscape in reality was the work of art,”14 he specified that the

Quarter-Mile works explored an “idea dealing with looking [sic]” at the scenery.15 The artist further acknowledged the commonalities between window-gazing and art-viewing by concurring with an observation made by interviewer Robin White (of the fortuitously titled View magazine) that the quarter-mile site perceived from a car assumed the appearance of “A very long painting.”16 General formal similarities between a window’s frame and glass pane, on one hand, and a painting’s frame and picture plane, on the other, elucidate NETCo’s strategy of producing views. Each car window, as a small, mobile frame close to beholders’ bodies, opens onto a panoramic image. Other apt painterly analogies to the horizontal prospect include landscape murals, theatre set pieces, and Chinese landscapes painted on long hand scrolls. While a passenger might more readily indulge in the sustained looking required for a panoramic impression of the view, a driver’s perception of the site might appear less as a continuous stream of visual details than as a series of discrete tableaux occasionally glimpsed in the peripheral field of vision. In this instance, each window frame presents the pane as the mobile surrogate for the space of representation of a canvas suspended at eye level next to similar paintings in a gallery.

In organizing the view, the windows and signs layer an artificial order onto the farmland and thereby accentuate the picture-like quality of the scenery. Viewers experience an illusion of the site as neatly composed and even conspicuously contrived. Such artifice derives especially from the geometric organization imposed by the rectangular shape of the windows and the signs’ the Frame (Vignettes),” in Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture, ed. Peter Brunette and David Wills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 118-140.

14 Iain Baxter, [Untitled], interview by Robin White, View 2:4 (September 1979): 22.

15 Ibid., 23.

16 Robin White, [Untitled], View 2:4 (September 1979): 23. 82 plotting of a series of points connected by the linear road. The location of the work was an inherently rectilinear composition of adjacent bands or planes of road, grass, crops, and trees.

NETCo’s framing of the view thus alluded to geometric perspective constructions employed in

Western painting and epitomized by Alberti’s reference to the window in his treatise On

Painting. The geometric ordering of the view is further apparent in documentation of the work.

A photograph taken by the artists through the front window clearly illustrates orthogonal lines receding toward a vanishing point at the left [figure 8]. Near the centre of the image, the vertical white post supporting the rectangular road sign bisects the diagonal, darker-coloured panels. The absence of human figures in the roadside, other than the occupants of the car, exaggerates the stark linearity of this minimalist, nearly abstract, composition. The interrelationship between framing and perspective surfaced as a major preoccupation in NETCo’s landscape-based work as discussed by Lucy R. Lippard in a 1969 Artscanada profile of Iain Baxter. She noted that many of these recent works probed the visual experience of space, distance, measurement, and direction through the temporary superimposition of lines, edges, and limits onto outdoor locations. In a comment applicable to the PEI view, she explained that these site-specific works geometrically ordered nature.17

Through the geometric organization imposed by framing devices, NETCo politicized the intangible, distanced view. The work presents a Canadian site as embedded in European spatial constructions, systems of thought, conceptions of sight, and genres of painting. NETCo’s signs claim and name the view as a Company “landscape,” gestures redolent of a colonizer’s

“discovery,” conquest, and mapping of New World lands. By complying with the instructions on

17 Lucy R. Lippard, “Iain Baxter: New Spaces,” Artscanada 26 (June 1969): 3. Lippard attributed the art and ideas of NETCo to Iain Baxter. However, I use the collective title of NETCo to more accurately credit both Iain and Ingrid Baxter as co-creators of the body of art and texts associated with N.E. Thing Company.

83 the signs, motorists are complicit with the visual consumption of newly conquered farmland unfurling past the windows. Since the early modern period, window views of geometrically ordered landscapes (along with their residents and caretakers) have been subjected to the all- seeing, masterful gaze of the elite. As a prominent historical example resonating with aspects of

NETCo’s work, the French garden treatise Le jardin de plaisir (1651) by André Mollet (1600?- circa 1665) promoted geometric landscape designs based on the visual field bordered by the window frames of aristocratic residences. A designer of royal gardens in France, England, the

Netherlands, and Sweden, Mollet planned axial compositions for the delectation of nobles gazing down at the grounds from the windows of a chateau. According to the author, the aristocratic gaze would best enjoy a garden view organized symmetrically around a central tree-lined avenue perpendicular to the façade of the building. This axis leads the eyes down and across an orderly, unobstructed expanse of parterres, fountains, and sculptures. Mollet’s catering to the royal eye’s window-bound expanse of vision, which he termed “[l’]estendue” [sic],18 advocated a god-like visual command from a strategic vantage point.

However, NETCo trumps the visual supremacy accorded by Mollet to the privileged garden proprietor. Unlike the noble at the elevated casement, the viewer on the ground in PEI is a mobile passerby unable either to apprehend the entirety of the site at any given moment or to leisurely inspect the rush of scenery. The motorist’s access to the NETCo landscape is tenuous and swiftly relinquished upon cessation of viewing. NETCo’s re-enactment of colonialist conquest was thus a subversive parody in which the farmland view momentarily belonged to anyone and no one. Meanwhile, Mollet’s garden plans securely position the viewer in relation to

18 André Mollet, Le jardin de plaisir (Stockholm: Henrich Keyser, 1651), n.p., http://architectura.cesr.univ- tours.fr/Traite/Images/INHA-FR543Index.asp. On gardens in early modern French aristocratic culture, see Sarah R. Cohen, “Aristocratic Traceries,” in Art, Dance and the Body in French Culture of the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 89-133.

84 a static, singular site. In contrast, the Baxters surprised and even confused the viewer with the unexpected appearance of the Quarter-Mile to be seen from many angles, positions, and speeds.

NETCo’s conception of the non-material site reworks the commercialized, 20th-century notion of the view through the window as an intangible commodity promoted by the real estate market. The vehicle passing by the field operates as a mobile, ersatz “room with a view.” Prized for its pleasing visual qualities, this type of framed view exists primarily to be seen and admired from the advantageous perspective of a window but not necessarily to be visited in person.19 In publicly installing the placards, the artists flaunted the quarter-mile vista as a visual product branded with the corporate label of the N.E. Thing Company. Although the signs did not intentionally advertise a sale, Iain Baxter admitted that the Quarter-Mile “worked as an incredible real estate device.” Numerous individuals, upon glimpsing the signs, expressed an interest in purchasing the nearby home of the farmer to whom the field belonged. After repeatedly receiving inquiries from prospective buyers driving up to his property, the farmer grew increasingly irked, leading the artists to remove the signs.20 Those hopeful buyers constituted the minority which refused to simply pass by but instead found the land and adjacent house to be desirable commodities. The notion of the framed view as a product valued as a source of visual enjoyment abounds in the language of the real estate industry. Advertising

19 In addition to providing visual enjoyment through windows, classical French aristocratic gardens also served as settings for elaborate court rituals, entertainment, and social gatherings.

20 Baxter, [Untitled], 22-23. The exact length of time for which the placards were left in place remains unknown. The signs of the Quarter-Mile reprise the wry advertising gimmickry, terse written commands, and framing devices on the printed invitation for an earlier NETCo work, Bagged Place (1966). Installed in the Fine Arts Gallery of the University of British Columbia during the McLuhan-inspired Festival for the Contemporary Arts, Bagged Place consisted of a four-room apartment the entire contents of which were sheathed in transparent plastic. The printed invite to the work bears a sign-like rectangle proclaiming “FOR RENT: BAGGED PLACE” followed by a parody of a newspaper classified ad including a description of the apartment and requirements for eligible tenants. Multiple framing devices, such as lines of stars, and repeated written orders—“Look” and “Come”—surround the text. See Iain Baxter, Invitation to Bagged Place, 1966, in Vincent Bonin and Grant Arnold, “Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980: An Annotated Chronology,” in Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980, ed. Grant Arnold and Karen Henry (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2012), 124. 85 rhetoric for private homes and apartments vaunts properties whose windows open onto attractive outdoor scenery. Landscape prospects lead to profits.

As architectural historian Sandy Isenstadt has explained, the landscape view was subjected to a “visual commodification” within the real estate appraisal industry of the 20th century, meaning that the quality of scenery visible from the windows of a home was a recognized criterion contributing to the overall worth of the property. Framed views could be owned, taxed, bought, and sold as part of the physical property.21 As suggested by Baxter’s anecdote, the NETCo work apes real estate gimmickry by using windows and signs to re- package the site as an enticing object of desire promising visual mastery and aesthetic pleasure.

Simultaneously, the artists frustrate such visual access by marketing the site as a Company product to be loaned briefly for vicarious possession but not available for personal ownership.

NETCo’s affirmation of the view as publicly accessible visual property resonated with legal discourses of the 1960s in which the act of visually enjoying scenery became a protected right and privilege. During that decade, Isenstadt wrote, “scenic easements,” defined as “the right to view a scene in perpetuity,” became a legal issue in land management as community activists strove to obtain official protection for the integrity of outdoor views, whether in private or public spaces. The US Supreme Court granted monetary compensation for “damage to esthetic values” of landscape views.22

By alluding to various conceptions of the view as promulgated in different eras, NETCo’s work confirmed that window scenery was not only a visual but also a historical phenomenon.

The artists’ framing of a Maritime field contributed to the general historicizing of framed,

21 On the history of the “view” in US real estate, see Sandy Isenstadt, “The Visual Commodification of Landscape in the Real Estate Appraisal Industry, 1900-1992,” Business and Economic History 28:2 (Winter 1999): 61-69.

22 Ibid., 67. 86 intangible sites by the art world during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Multiple exhibitions and publications from that era, most pertaining to landscape painting, contextualized the framed view as an early modern and modern phenomenon typified by the use of portable viewing instruments equipped with frames and lenses to observe sites, including the telescope and camera obscura.

Through diverse technical means and viewing conditions, both the car windows central to the

PEI work and older optical instruments transformed sites into fleeting images. While NETCo invited viewers to participate in the formation of relatively simple views, historical viewing apparatuses received notice from scholars and artists in the sixties for generating otherworldly visions, illusions, reflections, or projections within the confines of small, hand-held framing devices. For instance, the Company’s display of disembodied, evanescent sites evocative of an alternate reality in the window was a mundane variation of an occult visuality. In 1966, scholars considered with renewed interest the lore surrounding spectral apparitions of an invisible afterworld that once flickered in the “devil’s looking-glass,” a famed relic acquired that year by the British Museum. This object was the magical obsidian mirror used by the Elizabethan royal physician and astrologer Dr. John Dee (1527-1608) to communicate with the dead.23

Throughout the close of the sixties, other art institutions and artists contributed to the

Baxters’ exploration of elusive, impenetrable image-sites mediated by framing contraptions.

Coinciding with the year of NETCo’s Quarter-Mile series, Robert Smithson published “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan” in 1969. In this article, Smithson mused on reflections in the black obsidian mirrors of the ancient Mayans and the concave mirrors of the Olmecs during his installation of the “mirror displacements” in the sands and vegetation of Yucatán. The deliriously

23 Dr. Dee, also a mathematician and avid practitioner of crystallomancy, was consultant physician to Queen Elizabeth I. The mirror had once been in the possession of Horace Walpole. See Hugh Tait, “‘The Devil’s Looking- Glass’: The Magical Speculum of Dr. John Dee,” in Horace Walpole: Writer, Politician, and Connoisseur, Essays on the 250th Anniversary of Walpole’s Birth, ed. Warren Hunting Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 195-212. 87 overlapping mirror images referred to in Smithson’s writing and concretized in his artworks flouted expectations of attaining a coherent view of a site.24 Also in 1969, visitors to London’s

Hayward Gallery were exposed to what might be considered the 18th-century predecessor of the automobile’s rear- and side-view mirrors. At the Gallery, the public encountered the phenomenon of seeing vast sites condensed into dimmed, portable reflections encased in the curious “Claude glass.” Named for the French landscape painter Claude Lorrain (1600-1682), this hand-held, convex, tinted mirror in a velvet-lined box was used by British tourists and amateur artists to create preparatory images for sketches or paintings.25 Finally, NETCo’s use of windows to transform sites into image-like views resonated closely with the function of the

Claude glass as elaborated by Leslie Parris in the 1974 Tate Gallery exhibition catalogue,

Landscape in Britain c. 1750-1850. In a section documenting “optical instruments” and

“mechanical aids,” Parris cogently explicated the function of the Claude glass as “producing instant . . . images.”26 The Tate showcased the material artifacts from the history of the production of landscape imagery in the form of inventions from the 17th to the 19th centuries which filtered, mirrored, projected, shrunk, or magnified physical sites to assist artists, photographers, and scientists in observing and documenting outdoor settings. Apart from the

Claude glass, instruments displayed consisted of the camera obscura, camera lucida, graphic

24 Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan,” 122-123.

25 The Claude glass, on loan from the London Science Museum, was shown for the exhibition The Art of Claude Lorrain. See Michael Kitson, “Catalogue entry #185: A Claude Glass,” in The Art of Claude Lorrain (London: Hayward Gallery, in association with the Arts Council of Great Britain and the Northern Arts Association, 1969), 77. For an in-depth study of the history of the Claude glass and the Claude lens, see Arnaud Maillet, The Claude Glass: Use and Meaning of the Black Mirror in Western Art, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2004), and Lars Kiel Bertelsen, “The Claude Glass: A Modern Metaphor Between Word and Image,” Word & Image 20:3 (July/September 2004): 182-190.

26 Leslie Parris, “Optical Instruments,” in Landscape in Britain c. 1750-1850 (London: Tate Gallery, 1973), 124. 88 telescope, and calotype camera.27 NETCo’s construction of views contingent upon framed sight registered the contemporaneous awareness of the historicity of seeing practices and the proliferation of non-material scenery mediated by seeing apparatuses.

The Company’s illumination of the importance of framing devices in landscape history countered what remains arguably the most famed roadside view in the annals of sixties art: an account from 1966 by American sculptor, architect, and painter Tony Smith (1912-1980) of an evening drive along the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike in the early 1950s. Although Smith is perhaps best known for his large-scale, abstract sculptures, scholars and critics have devoted particular attention to his narrative about the Turnpike provided in an interview with Samuel

Wagstaff Jr. for Artforum. These critical readings upheld Smith’s drive as a compelling statement on such issues as minimalism, space, time, and the concept of artistic media.28 Framing strategies figured less prominently in appraisals of Smith’s account. However, frames are not only central to his description of the drive but also provide a foil to NETCo’s inquiry into framing the roadside view. Revisiting Smith’s account further elucidates the Baxters’ rethinking of sight, site specificity, and landscape imagery in the sixties. En route from the Meadows to

New Brunswick, Smith passed through an unmarked, “artificial” landscape devoid of lights, signs, or traffic lines. Veiled in darkness, the turnpike was a mass of ambiguous forms in an amorphous environment which the artist described as “mapped out but not socially recognized.”

Smith further clarified his encounter with the incomplete turnpike in terms germane to the

27 Parris also emphasized that “The rôle [sic] of mechanical aids in landscape art is an intriguing issue, but one which has hardly been investigated” (ibid., 124-125).

28 For example, see Michael Fried’s discussion of Smith’s drive on the Turnpike in “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum (June 1967); reprinted in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1968), 130-135. Citations refer to the 1968 edition. On notions of endlessness and duration in Smith’s drive within the context of the temporalities of 1960s art, see Pamela M. Lee, Preface to Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), xvii.

89 present analysis of land art, explaining that “There is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it.” That unique experience led the artist to conclude that “it ought to be clear that’s the end of art.” Images of empty, manmade landscapes incapable of fitting neatly into recognized categories, conventions, or boundaries resurfaced in Smith’s thought during his subsequent visit to “some abandoned airstrips in Europe–abandoned works, Surrealist landscapes, something that had nothing to do with any function, created worlds without tradition. Artificial landscape without cultural precedent began to dawn on me.”29

Smith articulated that the roadside site beheld through the window was not amenable to framing. Given that his account was certainly based on visual impressions of the drive, his reference to the impossibility of “framing” did not refer to the physical limits of the windows of his car. Rather, he pointed to the view as unframed by any physical objects or landmarks in the site itself. The Turnpike flashed by as an unfinished expanse lacking clear demarcations. As his other comments revealed, this curious roadside site also eluded framing in the sense that it could not be contained within inherited conceptual frameworks including “cultural precedent[s],”

“tradition[s],” “function[s],” and “socially recognized” forms of experience. The artist’s assertion that “There is no way you can frame it” further suggests that language could not adequately frame and recreate memories and sensations of an unmarked, alien, “Surrealist” site.

Unable to verbally convey his experience of the drive, Smith recommended to the interviewer and readers that “you just have to experience it.” NETCo countered Smith by inviting motorists to experience unexpected roadside views constructed by a range of formal, visual, and semantic framing devices in addition to more broadly construed conceptual frameworks and categories, including language, spatial boundaries, units of geographical measurement, geometric

29 Tony Smith, “Talking with Tony Smith: ‘I View Art as Something Vast,’” interview by Samuel Wagstaff Jr., Artforum 5:4 (December 1966): 19. My emphasis added. 90 perspective, temporal limits, and “tradition[s]” and “cultural precedents” from landscape art, garden history, real estate advertisements, and 1960s popular culture.

Road Trips

This section turns to the framing devices’ highlighting of the non-material view’s mobile appearance and the significance of this view in sixties art. NETCo undermine the materiality and fixity of the site by inviting viewers to experience a tract of land as an ephemeral, mutable view contingent upon the variable duration and speed of driving. The temporality and mobility of the roadside view were key points of convergence between NETCo’s framed Canadian farmland and

Smith’s unframed New Jersey Turnpike. Both cases of driving on North America’s east coast alluded to the perception, if not the reality, of the roadside view as flowing past the confines of the window and assuming a subtly altering appearance over time. The rolling roadside panorama is a vision of unanchored forms and patches of colour. By displaying a moving spectacle,

NETCo’s framing devices impose a time frame on the view. In the text on the three road signs, verb tenses and adverbs pertaining to time herald the site as existing in a singular, fleeting instant. Seconds before their encounter with the designated site, viewers are surprised by a sign informing them that they “will soon” behold a NETCo intervention. In the ensuing moments, the view comes briefly into existence during the interval carved out by the second and third signs, a lapse of time which abruptly “start[s]” and “stop[s].” Motorists are called upon to “pass by” the site, a temporal term conveying brevity and mortality. During this passage, the view looms before and flashes past the viewer who quickly overtakes the site.

Framing devices mediate and heighten awareness of the temporality of “serial vision.”

Geographer Jay Appleton explained “serial vision” in his 1975 book, The Experience of

Landscape, as a form of sight in which the seer gradually perceives multiple objects or forms, 91 whether individual units or combinations, in succession. Window-viewing while driving is a common example of this accretive faculty of sight,30closely associated with motion parallax. In the case of the PEI work, the seeming flux in the roadside and the parallax of forms in the field are striking effects of serially viewing a site from multiple points along the road. Each position offers a differently angled line of sight leading from the car to the field. The appearance of the mobile view is further impacted by which window or mirror the subject looks at. As a serial view, NETCo’s roadside is also an “anti-view” (to borrow the term exchanged between the

Baxters and Thomas H. Garver, director of the Newport Harbor Art Museum) because it defies the original definition of a “view” as being “covered by the eye from one point.”31

Recreating this anti-view clarifies the overlooked role of framing devices in organizing the serial vision of non-material roadsides. The edges of the windows proffer a stream of shifting forms succeeding, overlapping, or melting into one another. Simultaneously, the frontal, lateral, and rear windows fracture the flowing view across adjacent visual fields. Side- and rear-view mirrors further diversify the site by juxtaposing shrunken reflections of scenery behind the vehicle with larger window views of scenery rising before and slipping peripherally past the vehicle. The superimposition of the rear-view mirror upon the windscreen collapses the view onto itself: as the motorist approaches the outer limit of the quarter-mile stretch marked by the third sign, the diminishing reflection of the blank rear sides of the first and second signs lingers in the mirror. In addition, the scene in the window frames becomes increasingly fluid and elastic depending upon the driver’s modulation of the duration and speed of the drive. Upon acceleration or deceleration, the viewer will perceive the site as either a blurred rush or a more

30 Jay Appleton, The Experience of Landscape (London: John Wiley & Sons, 1975), 203-4, 210, 212, 217.

31 Oxford English Dictionary, “view, n.”

92 leisurely procession of form, colour, and text. The individual’s serial vision, whether the casual look of a passenger or the momentary glance of a driver, further shapes the visual impact of the mobile site. Within the confines of the frame, the serial anti-view emerges as an evanescent, unstable apparition.

In presenting the temporal flux of the view, NETCo reformulates the mobile site with reference to traditions of moving imagery displayed in framed formats, namely, film and television. The panorama unfolding in the windows is distinctly reminiscent of a cinematic widescreen projection while rear- and side-view mirrors suggest small television screens.

Moreover, NETCo’s triptych of documentary photographs of the Quarter-Mile reconstructs key moments of serial vision in a layout evocative of cinematic montage or a series of film stills. In her analysis of these photographs, curator Marie-Josée Jean detected an allusion to film editing patterns. As Jean wrote, the images, when beheld as a series, “ingenuously imitate cinematic ellipsis by linking spaces and times to convey the temporality of the route.”32 Framing devices also allude to viewing conditions and textual features associated with cinema. Beholding the PEI field as a spectacle while ensconced in a vehicle is the mobile counterpart to watching a drive-in movie while seated in a parked car. Road signs bolster the cinematic analogy by supplying surrogates for the opening titles and closing credits book-ending a film or television episode. As the sole written commentary glossing the view, the signs also figure as ambiguous versions of silent movie captions. Alternately, the artists’ placards provide open-ended director’s cues or stage directions for viewers who are thus addressed as performers actively engaging in this serial spectacle.

32 Marie-Josée Jean, “Quarter-Mile N.E. Thing Co. Landscape,” Baxter & N.E. Thing Co. Archives, Vox centre de l’image contemporaine, published 2005, revised 2009, http://www.voxphoto.com/fd/baxter/en/projet_ 14.html.

This window-bound spectacle builds upon the cinematic representation of framed scenery in an earlier NETCo work, View (1967), a photograph mounted on a light box [figure 11]. View preserves a frozen moment in highway mobility. Taken from within a moving vehicle, the photograph captures the front window framing a panoramic vista of a suburban street nearly vacant except for a few other cars on a distant perpendicular street. A pair of lit green traffic lights on either side of the road reveal that the Baxters’ vehicle is about to sail through an unobstructed intersection. Cloud-laden mountains lining the horizon and raised windshield wipers suggest that this is a view of rainy Vancouver, a recurring subject in NETCo’s conceptual photography of the sixties.33 Photographs of the Quarter-Mile reprise aspects of View, particularly the latter work’s resemblance to both a casual snapshot of a place and possibly a photograph, or still image, of a film scene. Both artworks explore the ambiguity of the view through a window as being simultaneously a place, a picture of scenery, and an image referencing another image. In the case of View, framing and optical devices reinforce this ambiguity. Although the photograph portrays a daytime scene, the visible underside of the vehicle’s roof and dashboard appear as two heavy, black bands compressing the view from above and below resulting in a composition akin to the format of a widescreen film projection in a dark theatre. This work also captures the experience of watching a film in a car parked in a drive-in lot at night. As a frame around the illuminated view, the interior of the vehicle is a cavern bathed in darkness, save for a thin line of blue light glinting on the edge of the dashboard.

The rear-view mirror is a curiously darkened void reflecting nothing and obstructing part of the mountains like a flying saucer-shaped blotch. That View is a transparency showcased in a light box reconfirms the effect of beholding a luminous projection on a screen in a darkened

33 The Baxters’ fascination with banal Vancouver street scenes and the use of light boxes obviously demonstrates an affinity with the works of fellow Vancouver artist, Jeff Wall. 94 environment or even a back-lit poster advertising a film in a cinema lobby. While the view is organized around the linear distance conveyed by the road plunging toward the horizon, the work’s formal references to two-dimensional photographic and film imagery trigger an irresolvable interplay between depth and surface in the confines of the window. Whereas the land work of 1969 explores the complexity of serial highway vision, the glowing view of 1967 appears to both inflate and retreat into a darkened abyss.

This pair of framed, cinematic views added to the body of time-based landscape imagery flourishing in conceptual art films around 1970. It is noteworthy that these works demonstrated an overarching interest in the temporality of sites viewed not merely as singular locations but rather as fluctuating entities animated by movement (including vehicles passing, human bodies gesticulating, and cameras swiveling). NETCo’s orchestration of the viewer’s serial perception of the kinetic roadside in 1969 coincided with a series of short films by prominent land and earthworks artists showcased in Land Art, the innovative “television gallery” exhibition publicly broadcast on Berlin television on April 15, 1969;34 Michael Snow’s disorienting experimental landscape film La Région centrale (1969); Jan Dibbets’s 1969 audio recording of a ten-mile drive along a dyke in the Netherlands; Robert Smithson’s science fiction-infused film Spiral

Jetty (1970); and Ant Farm’s deadpan and monotonous World’s Longest Bridge (1970), an unedited, twenty-four minute video of a drive along the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway in

Louisiana. Predating these audiovisual works, Edward Ruscha, Patrick Blackwell, and Mason

Williams merged landscape with cinematic allusions, road accidents, automobile crash tests, and

34 German filmmaker Gerry Schum conceived of the television gallery. Sender Freies Berlin aired Land Art, which included films directed by European land artists and American earthworks artists Keith Arnatt, Marinus Boezem, Barry Flanagan, Walter DeMaria, Jan Dibbets, Richard Long, Dennis Oppenheim, and Robert Smithson. These minimally edited films lacked verbal commentary except for a brief introductory segment preceding all of the films. For a history of the television gallery, see Ursula Wevers, “Gerry Schum: The Television Gallery [,] the Idea and How it Failed,” in Museums by Artists, ed. A.A. Bronson and Peggy Gale (1979; repr., Toronto: Art Metropole, 1983), 283-287. Also, see Boettger, Earthworks, 176-177. 95 crime scene photography in Royal Road Test (1967), a book of black and white photographs of the artists investigating the debris of a typewriter flung by a stretch of Highway 91 in the desert near Los Angeles.35

Automobile landscapes and serial viewing persisted in 1970s art. Vancouver artist Roy

Kiyooka documented his road trip from British Columbia to Nova Scotia in a series of 573 photographs entitled Long Beach to Peggy’s Cove (1971).36 Nancy Holt made unfinished films of bridges spanning the Hudson River between New Jersey and New York and the Merritt

Parkway overpasses in Connecticut.37 Her artistic documentary film Pine Barrens (1975), which depicted an undeveloped, sparsely populated, wooded area in New Jersey, included views shot through the window of a moving car. In words summarizing the leitmotif of the preceding body of road trip art, she commented that Pine Barrens unfurled “visual imagery [that] was constantly in flux.”38 Meanwhile, the Baxters’ exploration of serial road vision in PEI presaged their ambitious conception in 1970 of the Trans-Canada Movie, also known as the 5000 Mile Movie, to be filmed from a vehicle driving from east to west along the entire Trans-Canada Highway.

Never executed, the film would have been, according to the artists, a 120 hour-long “historical and social document” of the country’s geography and inhabitants.39 Ironically, the era’s most

35 Edward Ruscha, Patrick Blackwell, and Mason Williams, Royal Road Test (New York: G. Wittenborn, 1967).

36 On this series, see Grant Arnold, “Reference/ Cross Reference: Conceptual Art on the West Coast,” in Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980, ed. Grant Arnold and Karen Henry (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2012), 98.

37 Alena J. Williams, Introduction to Nancy Holt: Sightlines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 27.

38 Nancy Holt, “Pine Barrens” (1975); reprinted in Nancy Holt: Sightlines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 251.

39 NETCo, “Trans-Canada Movie” outline and budget proposal, 1970, n.p., Box 15, File 22, Iain Baxter Fonds CA OTAG SC064, E.P. Taylor Research Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

96 iconic footage of a journey in a landscape was not even terrestrial: on July 20, 1969, the world’s television viewers witnessed grainy images of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon.40

The cinematic qualities of NETCo’s fleeting roadside view, along with contemporaneous experimental travel films, revealed artists’ reprise of the road trip film genre. Land artists adopted the imagery of automobile travel and roadside locales typical of such films, rather than particularities of plot, theme, or character development. The Company’s co-presidents planted signs that required viewers to approach the site as an intriguing mental detour and a mysterious episode punctuating a longer journey filled with diverse roadside settings and events. The influence of the road trip, as both a tourist activity and a film genre, upon NETCo’s conception of the view is elucidated by locating the PEI work in the culture of travel unique to land art and earthworks. The often remote locations of such works obliged urban art aficionados and critics to embark on lengthy car trips to visit creations not exhibited in conventional indoor galleries or museums. Making and viewing art were inextricably bound with road trips. The logistics of planning the voyage, the drive, the consultation of maps, and the mounting exhilaration preceding the arrival at the artwork: these facets of road travel shaped viewers’ overall visual experiences of land works in the countryside or earthworks in the desert. Long-distance driving also fuelled the conception and creation of artworks as the quarter-mile drive was part of the

Baxters’ eventful, cross-Canada journey by pickup truck during late May and June, 1969. From their home in North Vancouver to the east coast of Newfoundland, NETCo created artworks in each province.41 Such drives, comprised of hours of window-viewing, sight-seeing, occasional

40 On the historical coincidence of the Apollo mission and currents in European and American outdoor art, see Joy Sleeman, “Land Art and the Moon Landing,” Journal of Visual Culture 8:3 (2009): 299-328.

41 Some of the highlights of this trip were NETCo’s installation of the Company’s offices on the ground floor of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa throughout June and a sign installation in the Confederation Art Centre in Charlottetown, PEI. On NETCo’s summer art trip, see Joan Lowndes, “Iain Baxter – Genius or Mastercrassman,” Vancouver Province, May 16, 1969, 13, and Charlotte Townsend, “N.E. Thing Goes Across Canada,” Vancouver 97 adventures, and mishaps, logically invited comparisons with road movies. Critic and curator

Jeffrey Weiss recently correlated the history of land art and earthworks with the spatial narrative of the road trip film.42

Closer to the era of the Quarter-Mile, art critic Dave Hickey, in a 1971 Art in America article, obliquely contextualized outdoor art in the legacy of cinematic representations of roads, roadsides, and road travel. He accomplished this in a collage-like juxtaposition of text and photographs reminiscent of some of Smithson’s publications from the 1960s. In his article,

Hickey interspersed reproductions of earthworks by Heizer, Oppenheim, and Smithson in the

Southwestern deserts amongst an eclectic array of film stills of Dorothy and her friends on the yellow brick road in The Wizard of Oz (1939) and motorcyclists coasting down the highway in

Easy Rider (1969). The author’s meandering text indirectly situates earthworks in the North

American culture of life on the road through references to the oral culture and songs of nomadic cowboys, trail-hands, and cattle ranchers while photographs of highways and heavy duty roadwork construction equipment crop up in the page margins (an homage to the machinery used in the making of earthworks).43

The NETCo work and Hickey’s article underscored the framed, mobile roadside view and the road trip as topical motifs in North American visual culture around 1969. The four sides of each car window and the edges of movie and television screens offered vicarious access to urban and rural sites experienced as technologically mediated, framed views. Although depictions of car travel in film and literature preceded the execution of the Quarter-Mile, NETCo’s work

Sun, June, 1969. The latter document, as preserved in the N.E. Thing Co. Artist File, 1965-1975, Vancouver Art Gallery Library and Archives, lacks a precise date and page number.

42 Jeffrey Weiss, “On the Road: Jeffrey Weiss on Land Art Today,” Artforum 47 (September 2008): 131.

43 Dave Hickey, “Earthscapes, Landworks and Oz,” Art in America (September/October 1971): 40-49. 98 spoke to the profusion of representations of roadside views in late sixties mass culture. The

Baxters joined conceptual artists in their push to integrate art with everyday life by framing the view not only as a moving image of a specific location but also as a pop culture subgenre of landscape imagery, a quintessential theme of its era. The cinematic PEI vista coincided opportunely with the release of the American film Easy Rider in 1969, the epitome of the sixties road trip film. Canada added to the genre in 1970 with Goin’ Down the Road, partially shot in the Maritimes. On the small screen, footage of roadside vistas traversed by car and motorcycle recurred respectively in the American series Route 66 (1960-1964) and Then Came Bronson

(1969-1970). Spectators found a potentially liberating counterpoint to the repetitive daily commute in portrayals of a nomadic life on the highway unshackled by mainstream social constraints and replete with stereotyped imagery of endless roads and wide open spaces.

NETCo tapped into North American aspirations, anxieties, and youth culture exuberance manifested in road travel, whether long-distance road tripping, vacationing, hitchhiking, joy riding, cruising, or drag racing. Recreational and quotidian highway travel and their associated roadside views proliferated in music, literature, visual art, as well as nomadic countercultural lifestyles. The visual site framed by NETCo was thus also part of a landscape of the mind. The following examples demonstrate the diversity and potency of the road trip topos in the sixties. In popular music of the fifties and sixties, the thrills, perils, and wanderlust of driving on the open road were established staples epitomized by the car race in Chuck Berry’s song “Maybellene”

(1955), the Beach Boys’ album Little Deuce Coupe (1963), Bob Dylan’s album Highway 61

Revisited (1965), and the Grateful Dead’s song “Truckin’” (1970).44 Meanwhile, the road trip had an esteemed post-war literary history beginning with Jack Kerouac’s Beat novel On the

44 Prior to this era, one of the best-known songs about North American highway travel was “Get Your Kicks on Route 66” written by Bobby Troup and recorded by Nat “King” Cole in 1946. 99

Road (1958) and John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley (1962).45 By the late sixties, the wanderings of drug users, hippie backpackers, and dropouts captured the era’s literary imagination as in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) and James A.

Michener’s The Drifters (1971).46 J.D. Reed’s Expressways Poems of 1969 portrayed views through car windows of a culturally bereft North America plagued by kitschy drive-in facilities and violent traffic accidents.47 This bleak roadside view was brutally realized in Duane Hanson’s uncannily lifelike sculpture of a fatally injured young male Motorcycle Victim (1969).48 Road trips also comprised two of the most significant episodes in the decade’s countercultural history: the 1964 LSD-fuelled bus trip across the United States taken by author Ken Kesey and his band of “Merry Pranksters” (a journey which participants filmed, foreshadowing NETCo’s Trans-

Canada Movie) and the nearly thirty-mile long traffic jams paralyzing roads leading to a farm in

Bethel, New York, site of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair held in August of 1969, coinciding with the summer of the Quarter-Mile.49 The signboards of NETCo’s PEI work offer a corollary to the counterculture’s harnessing of the road trip as a vehicle for social and aesthetic experimentation by calling upon motorists to “start viewing” the world afresh. However, in

45 See Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Viking Press, 1958) and John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America (New York: Viking Press, 1962).

46 Thompson’s work was originally published in Rolling Stone, November, 1971. See Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1998) and James A. Michener, The Drifters: A Novel (New York: Random House, 1971).

47 See J.D. Reed, Expressways Poems (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969).

48 Given the era of its creation, Hanson’s fibreglass and polyester sculpture brings to mind Bob Dylan’s motorcycle crash of 1966 and actor James Dean’s fatal road accident in 1955.

49 The bus, nicknamed “Furthur,” was painted in psychedelic, Day-Glo colours. The classic reference on Kesey’s activities in the 1960s is Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968). On the Woodstock traffic jams, see Barnard L. Collier, “200,000 Thronging to Rock Festival Jam Roads Upstate,” New York Times, August 16, 1969, 1, 31. 100 distinction from most manifestations of road trip culture, NETCo refined the cinematic, roadside view into an artistic theme in its own right.

The Baxters’ emphasis on the ubiquity of the framed, mobile view was also a response to the unprecedented number of cars across Canada by the end of the decade. Canadian passenger car production ascended to record-breaking numbers, resulting partly from the increased buying power of the Baby Boomer generation. Whereas manufacturers turned out 323, 638 units in

1961, they produced over one million units in 1971.50 By the late sixties, Canadian per capita ownership of cars ranked second in the world after the United States.51 Expanded highway and freeway construction across Canada lead to higher traffic density and further stimulated the development of roadsides catering to vacationers and tourists, such as parks, scenic routes, lookouts, and camping grounds. In 1970, the country boasted the world’s longest highway upon the completion of the Trans-Canada Highway.52 The automobile was the preferred means of transport for family holidays. Significantly, of the over fifty million visitors to Expo 67, a

Montreal survey determined that the average fairgoer had arrived by car.53 As of the early seventies, Canada and the United States were leaders of the “mobile society,” which, along with its omnipresent drive-in roadside facilities, was on the verge of becoming a global phenomenon,54 despite the mounting concerns of citizens’ activist groups and environmentalists over vehicle safety and the impact of driving upon public health and the environment. 55

50 Desmond Morton, Wheels: The Car in Canada (Toronto: Umbrella Press, 1998), 65-69.

51 Robert Collins, A Great Way to Go: The Automobile in Canada (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1969), 89. For a photographic history of the car in Canada, see Bill Sherk, 60 Years Behind the Wheel: The Cars We Drove in Canada 1900-1960 (Toronto: Dundurn, 2003).

52 Morton, Wheels, 65-69.

53 Peter Jackman, “Expo—It’s All Over After 185 Days, 50 Million Visitors,” Ottawa Journal, October 30, 1967; repr., Expo 67 News Articles, National Capital FreeNet, http://expo67.ncf.ca/expo_67_news_p55.html.

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NETCo’s presentation of the framed, serial site as quintessential to North American society aligned with the general viewpoints expressed by contemporary commentators of the late sixties. In the following key texts published around 1969, journalists and historians emphasized the visible impact of driving upon everyday life in an era of unrivalled mobility. Journalist and essayist Tom Wolfe noted in 1966 that automobiles and car culture pervaded the leisure activities and popular culture of North America. As Wolfe remarked somewhat sarcastically, cars had become a major social issue receiving a “quasi-religious dedication” from the general public on par with that bestowed by the educated elite upon high art.56 With the Quarter-Mile work,

NETCo deftly interwove mass culture and contemporary art. Robert Collins, in his 1969 book on

Canadian automobile history, also underscored the unprecedented visibility of the car in that decade. Enumerating the car’s impact upon traveling habits, commuting, socializing, leisure activities, as well as architectural design and courtship rituals, Collins claimed with deliberate hyperbole that “the automobile is the deity of our time,”57 a seductive idol which had imposed a

54 John B. Rae, The Road and the Car in American Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 153.

55 Evidently, the vitality of the automobile industry had its detractors in the late sixties and early seventies. The widening ecological movement of the sixties critiqued the malignant effects of the car on the environment while citizens’ activist groups in the United States protested against highway construction. Attorney and activist Ralph Nader warned against the dangers of the automobile in his report Unsafe at any Speed (1965) and the US government introduced legislation, such as the Clean Air Act, to check the nefarious effects of transportation technology. For a history of the criticisms voiced against the car in the US, see Jane Holtz Kay, Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America, and How We Can Take it Back (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Meanwhile, predictions for the car’s impending doom emerged amongst those studying the development and social effects of technology. Automobile journalist John Jerome wrote in 1972 that “When the history of the automobile is written, scholars will necessarily focus careful attention on the crucial period of the late sixties and early seventies. During that period the largest industry the world had ever known . . . peaked out. The automobile industry began to die.” See John Jerome, The Death of the Automobile: The Fatal Effect of the Golden Era, 1955- 1970 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1972), 13. Marshall McLuhan posited the demise of the car by the early seventies: he predicted that electronic transport and the emergence of a “pedestrian scale” would inevitably displace the car and that the automobile would return to occupy “a subsidiary role in culture,” such as a fashionable status symbol or collector’s item. See Marshall McLuhan, “Motorcar: The Mechanical Bride,” in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 3rd ed. (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964), citations appear on 225,218, 220, respectively.

56 Tom Wolfe, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966), 35.

102

“tyranny we freely choose”58 and from which “[n]obody escapes.”59 The ubiquity of the automobile in “our time” surfaced in another book published in 1972 by former automotive journalist John Jerome who forecasted that the sixties would mark the end of the “golden era” of the car’s history.60 Despite their differing historical methodologies, Collins and Jerome shared the presentiment that the popularity of the car had attained its apogee by the late 1960s.

NETCo’s Quarter-Mile broached such prognostications on the possibly impending obsolescence of a commonplace machine (and the viewing habits associated with it) by staging a fleeting roadside spectacle for motorists told to “stop viewing.”

While acknowledging the roadside view’s current omnipresence, NETCo also adopted framing devices to challenge motorists into seeing banal, familiar sites anew as loci of the uncommon and unfamiliar. The Company members’ approach to framing sites as curious hybrids of images, places, and moving spectacles can be usefully compared with the treatment of the window frame in written accounts of highway travel by other sixties art world figures. These field reports illuminated the morphing of mundane vistas into strange, moving visions haunting bus and car windows. Robert Smithson re-envisioned a banal automobile landscape as a complex, even bewildering, fusion of multiple sensory experiences. In his illustrated essay “A

Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” (1967), the artist recounted that while journeying by bus from Manhattan to Passaic, he glanced up from the arts column in his newspaper and observed that “Outside the bus window a Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge flew

57 Collins, A Great Way to Go, 94.

58 Ibid., 91.

59 Ibid., 90.

60 John Jerome, The Death of the Automobile: The Fatal Effect of the Golden Era, 1955-1970 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1972), 13. 103 by—a symphony in orange and blue.”61 The outlines of the motel, its signs, driveways, and parking areas filled with cars had melted into floating smears of colour. Just as Iain Baxter likened viewing the quarter-mile landscape with beholding a landscape painting, Smithson’s comment filtered high-speed optical confusion through the lens of modern painting. The description of the Motor Lodge as “a symphony in orange and blue” sardonically recast a tacky detail of roadside topography in the glass pane as a pseudo-abstract impressionist canvas spattered with garish, contrasting pigments. For Smithson, serial vision also yielded a synaesthetic perception of mobile views as he correlated seeing colours with hearing music. The symphonic union of orange and blue unleashed more of a visual cacophony than a melodic blend. Smithson’s choice of words played upon George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (1924) while parodying the titles of numerous works by the American painter James Abbot McNeill

Whistler (1834-1903), famed for his “symphonies” and “nocturnes” of various hues. Smithson thus conjured the flying roadside window view as a blast of colour, movement, and sound.

In 1969, Smithson imagined the car window as a visual framing device for alien and sublime cinematic roadside views in “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan.” Rich reds, oranges, and yellows saturated the artist’s recollection of Highway 261, a view animated by vigourous movements described in graphic metaphors. Hurtling down the highway, the artist stared ahead, transfixed by the road, the sky, and the horizon entangled in a violent sacrificial rite staged before the window: “Through the windshield the road stabbed the horizon, causing it to bleed a sunny incandescence. One couldn’t help feeling that this was a ride on a knife covered

61 Robert Smithson, “The Monuments of Passaic,” Artforum (December 1967); reprinted as “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 69. Despite general thematic similarities between selected works of NETCo and Smithson, Lippard aptly singled out the contrast between Iain Baxter’s fascination with “the dynamics of rapid change” and Smithson’s “entropy or energy drain approach to earth, history and time.” She further pitted NETCo’s interest in infinite space and ephemeral matter against Smithson’s interest in the finite and the preserved. See Lippard, “Iain Baxter: New Spaces,” 4. 104 with solar blood.”62 The highway journey detoured into a hallucinogenic trip as images from science fiction literature, horror films, and ancient Mesoamerican sacrificial ceremonies swirled into a nightmarish vision fixed at the horizon and yet disquietingly close to the windshield.

By de-familiarizing the mobile window view, artists employed framing devices to disrupt the normative process of serial viewing. The unexpected appearance and ambiguous texts of

NETCo’s road signs caught passersby off their guard, thereby prompting viewers to actively adjust their usual window-gazing habits to the viewing conditions implemented by the Quarter-

Mile work. Smithson adopted the window as a lens through which roadside views became visions of disturbing surreality. In a similar trajectory, Dave Hickey wrote in 1971 that driving through the American deserts, the preferred territory of earthworks artists, necessitated the adoption of new viewing techniques. Whereas NETCo’s frames and Smithson’s writings revealed window views as sites of visual plenitude, Hickey cast his eyes upon scenic sparseness.

The critic described the desert as a vast, sublime emptiness thwarting standards of normative sight: “In big country you do not see in the ordinary way. . . . There is literally nothing to see, so that is what you look at: the nothingness—the nothing-ness. Vacant space is the physical fact you perceive most insistently, pressing down on the earth as the prehistoric oceans used to.”63

Framing devices bounding non-material sites played a key role in the driver’s acclimatizing to desert viewing. Hickey observed that in this “country of such spectacular monotony,” drivers perceived sites as abstract intervals divided by often invisible, immaterial boundaries. Amidst vast open spaces, he noted, “you become acutely sensitized to the conceptual spaces through which you are plummeting—time zones, states, counties, water districts, flyways, national parks,

62 Robert Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan,” Artforum (September 1969); reprinted in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 120.

63 Hickey, “Earthscapes, Landworks and Oz,” 41.

105 weather systems,” and radio station frequencies.64 These unseen divisions also ordered the supposedly unmarked New Jersey Turnpike flowing past Tony Smith’s windows. Amidst these

“conceptual spaces,” earthworks were visible intrusions in the void. Monumental structures oriented and anchored sight by demarcating zones distinct from the rest of this “unbounded environment.” Hickey interpreted earthworks as “marking out, activating [,] and controlling spaces,”65 all framing strategies significant to NETCo’s Quarter-Mile.

Traveling art critics also responded to the challenging viewing conditions of land art and earthworks by generating a new, road trip-inspired genre of art criticism. As of 1969, the year of the Quarter-Mile’s installation, critics penned first-person narratives to chronicle their peregrinations to land artworks and earthworks. These essays fused elements of the journal entry, travelogue, field report, and interview to shape a genre which Hickey dubbed “a kind of National

Geographic for Esthetes.”66 NETCo’s land art was a key inspiration behind the development of field-report art criticism. One of the earliest on-site reports was Lucy R. Lippard’s diary-like account, published in 1969, describing her voyage to the Canadian Arctic to create land artworks with NETCo, amongst other artists. The following year, Philip Leider’s conversational Artforum essay recounted his car trips with Richard Serra, Joan Jonas, and Robert Smithson to visit

Michael Heizer’s Double Negative and Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in the American deserts. The land art-field report has persisted into the 21st century.67

64 Ibid., 45.

65 Ibid., 44.

66 Ibid., 48. For a discussion of site reports on earthworks in the context of discourses of the American wilderness and the Wild West in the sixties, see Boettger, Earthworks, 197.

67 See Lucy R. Lippard, “Art within the Arctic Circle,” The Hudson Review 22 (Winter 1969-1970): 665-674. Leider described driving with Richard Serra and Joan Jonas from Berkeley, California to Nevada to visit Michael Heizer’s monumental earthwork Double Negative, before driving to Utah to see Spiral Jetty with Smithson. See Philip Leider, “How I Spent My Summer Vacation or, Art and Politics in Nevada, Berkeley, San Francisco and 106

The preceding permutations of the late sixties roadside anti-view continued a longer history of framed, mobile, non-material sites in writings on modern Western transportation technology. This history was comprised of a set of key moments from the 18th to the 20th centuries during which passengers on mobile vehicles articulated their awareness of the strangeness and evanescence of the window view and the complexity of viewing. Serial vision of non-material sites was thus both a perceptual phenomenon and a literary motif. Akin to NETCo’s fascination with flying sites beheld at the height of mobile society in the sixties, passenger- commentators of previous historical eras wrote about established forms of popular transport familiar to their readership. The narrators of the following accounts sustained an inquisitive sight. Perhaps the earliest precursor to NETCo’s inquiry into the window’s display of fleeting, rural sites is a poetic passage by the Reverend William Gilpin (1724-1804), whose travelogues contributed substantially to picturesque landscape theories in 18th-century Britain. Gilpin evocatively detailed recollections of riding in a horse-drawn carriage through sylvan scenery while clasping a Claude glass before his eyes. Musing with astonishment and delight upon the reflections, the author portrayed the framed serial view as a river of phantasmagorical scenery:

In a chaise particularly the exhibitions of the convex-mirror are amusing. We are rapidly carried from one object to another. A succession of high-coloured pictures is continually gliding before the eye. They are like the visions of the imagination; or the brilliant landscapes of a dream. Forms, and colours, in brightest array, fleet before us; . . . .68

Utah,” Artforum (September 1970): 40-42; 45; 48-49. A decade later, critic and art historian John Beardsley penned his famed field report criticizing the plethora of restrictions placed upon travel and access to Lightening Field (1977), an installation in New Mexico by earthwork artist Walter De Maria. See John Beardsley, “Art and Authoritarianism: Walter de Maria’s Lightening Field,” October 16 (Spring 1981): 35-38. Also, see the following books by scholars recounting their road trips across the American deserts to view earthworks: Gilles A. Tiberghien, Land Art Travelling (Valence: École Régionale des Beaux-arts, 1996), Erin Hogan, Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip Through the Land Art of the American West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), and Kenneth Baker, The Lightning Field (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

68 William Gilpin, Remarks on Forest Scenery, and Other Woodland Views, (Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty) Illustrated by the Scenes of New-Forest in Hampshire. In Three Books . . . ., By William Gilpin, . . . , vol. 2, 2nd ed. (London: Printed for R. Blamire, 1794), 225. 107

Imagery of the serial view as a fantastic “succession of . . . pictures,” “gliding” past a frame, resurfaced in a different guise in 19th-century descriptions of views through steam engine compartment windows. The advent of passenger rail travel in the early 19th century ushered in novel conditions for viewing landscapes at unprecedented speeds. NETCo’s insistence that motorists “start [re]viewing” the complexity of the temporality and dynamism of window views found a notable predecessor in early narratives of train travel. One theme with a particular affinity to the Baxters’ non-material views was the emphasis placed by 19th-century writings on the passenger’s discovery of the unreality and intangibility of the visual realm flashing past the window. The rail car view emerged as a high velocity, kaleidoscopic flow of scenery. Wolfgang

Schivelbusch, in his seminal history of 19th-century train travel, qualified this new landscape view as a mobile, “panoramic” perception generating disembodied, evanescent sites.69

Amongst contemporary publications, the travel writings of Benjamin Gastineau (1823-

1904), compiled in La Vie en chemin de fer (1861), cogently encapsulated some of the major forms of sight and site associated with train travel. He devised the concept of “la philosophie synthétique du coup d’oeil” to explain the rail passenger’s rapid, seemingly effortless optical and mental assessment of a bombardment of contrasting sceneries and shifting angles of vision within the confines of the compartment window.70 Whereas Gastineau’s passengers had adapted themselves to the intricacy of trackside views, novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922) later sketched a passenger’s grappling with perceptual disjunctions in shifting railcar views. In À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927), the narrator recounts a journey spent gazing through “the pale

69 See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, “Railroad Space and Railroad Time,” “Panoramic Travel,” in The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the 19th Century, trans. Anselm Hollo (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), 41-49; 57-72. Shelley Rice has analyzed the 19th-century French rail passenger’s loss of an embodied connection with sites perceived as intermingled afterimages as well as photographers’ responses to new notions of spectatorship and subjectivity associated with train travel. See Shelley Rice, “Voyages without Steam or Sail: Afterimages from the Floating Head,” in Parisian Views (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 182-216.

70 Benjamin Gastineau, La Vie en chemin de fer (Paris: Bonaventure et Duces Sois, 1861), 31-32. 108 square of the window” at the sites dashing by. The passenger improvises an ambulatory, enervating technique of composing a unified view. He elaborates that “I spent my time running from one window to the other to reassemble, to collect on a single canvas the intermittent, antipodean fragments of my fine, scarlet, everchanging morning, and to obtain a comprehensive view and a continuous picture of it.”71 Despite the obvious contrast between the athletic train passenger and the sedentary car passenger, Proust’s narrator and NETCo emphasize the window frame as a filter through which sites become “everchanging” views.

The motorist-viewer of the late sixties and early seventies inherited characteristics from both Gastineau’s receptively synthesizing passenger and Proust’s energetically synthesizing passenger. For the acclimatized viewer of Gastineau, the complexity of the train compartment window view had shed its novelty and become an amusing distraction or merely a quotidian occurrence. Highway serial vision was also thoroughly familiar to the mobile subjects of the era of NETCo’s work amidst the explosion of road trip culture. Nevertheless, NETCo also promoted a mode of sight approaching that of Proust by inciting motorists to active participation with greater curiosity in peering through windows to give new shape and meaning to the world.

Moreover, Proust and NETCo dismissed the notion of technology’s unidirectional impact upon sight. In experimenting with seeing, the viewer (often unintentionally) invented personalized uses for existing transportation technology. NETCo encouraged viewers to appropriate the accoutrements of the car and highway signage to re-imagine roadside geography as a complex view both laden with history and topical to the 1960s.

Highway Readings

71 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 2, Within a Budding Grove, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), 268. 109

Although physically removed from the viewer on the road, the fluctuating view was nonetheless contingent upon the viewer’s presence. In this section, I address how the artists’ use of road signs as book-end framing contraptions debunks the assumptions that a site precedes and is fully autonomous from the viewer’s presence and interpretation. The road signs appeal to a beholder’s abilities to read, analyze, classify, imagine, and otherwise attribute meaning to visual experiences of scenery in the window. The subject’s responses to this encounter produce new, mental sites. Such views are conceptual and personalized readings. This section thus elaborates upon sustained viewing in distinction from an earlier section’s discussion of the passerby’s disconnectedness from the roadside.

The semantic content of the road signs invents a site that viewers enrich through spontaneous reactions and personal readings. The proclamation of the first sign brings into being the fictitious “N.E. Thing Co. Landscape” by publicly renaming a portion of the field. Such a bold, yet enigmatic, announcement triggers a range of thoughts and feelings. Confusion, apprehension, or curiosity would have tinged the thoughts of locals and visitors passing by the field. Beholders soon discover a new site marked out by the “start” and “stop viewing” signs analogous to the entrance and exit signs of a building. Considering viewers’ interpretive participation in the work nuances previous statements made by the artists about their in situ text- based artworks. In an interview from 1969, the artists posited that “the signs, erected at various outdoor locations, interpret or redefine the larger space.”72 This quote implied that the texts transformed the site by hinting at a new range of potential meanings and uses loosely determined by the artists rather than by viewers. NETCo’s comment also downplayed the provocative, humourously confrontational nature of their site-specific interventions. The PEI work demonstrates that instead of concentrating on a semantic, conceptual exploration of sites, the

72 Townsend, “N.E. Thing Goes across Canada,” (includes an interview with NETCo). 110 artists ambushed unsuspecting users of the road with unforeseen signs which incited surprised and puzzled viewers to respond. To transform or remap an outdoor site flanking a public road is to create a new site exposed to, and shaped by, public reactions.

The Quarter-Mile’s installation in 1969 marked the apex of the artists’ planting of signs to direct visual attention to newly proclaimed NETCo landscapes, often in remote areas. Iain

Baxter sent a note dated March 30, 1969, to critic Lucy R. Lippard in which he outlined an

“Ecological Project” conceived the previous year and tentatively entitled “Landscape

Identification Permanent Location.” He proposed affixing photographs of a designated area to posts on the same spots where the camera had stood. This installation of images would be a permanent record of the site as it appeared at a specific time. He also suggested that “other photos of [the] same area may be taken at yearly intervals and set up in [the] same manner in other locations on [the] same general site.”73 Texts soon replaced images in other sign works of that year. In the summer, at the most easterly part of Canada on Newfoundland’s Atlantic coast, the artists planted a white signboard emblazoned with slightly irregularly shaped, uppercase black letters spelling “YOU ARE NOW IN THE MIDDLE OF A N.E. THING CO.

LANDSCAPE.”74 A few months later, they transported a nearly identical sign to the Northwest

Territories where they were accompanied by Lippard and artists Lawrence Weiner and Harry

Savage. On September 26, NETCo and Lippard claimed an undefined stretch of the arctic taiga- tundra by attaching the sign onto slender trees [figure 12].75 The members of NETCo judiciously selected far-flung sites of distinctive topographies that would inspire the viewer to chart an

73 Iain Baxter, letter to Lucy R. Lippard, March 30, 1969, Correspondence – 6, 1969, Box 10, File 10, Iain Baxter Fonds CA OTAG SC064, E.P. Taylor Research Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

74 Townsend, “N.E. Thing Goes Across Canada.”

75 Lippard, “Art within the Arctic Circle,” 668.

111 imaginative mental geography. Such views induce intriguing exercises in analyzing and codifying contrasting Canadian landscapes.

In its immediate art historical context, NETCo’s preoccupation with installing and documenting outdoor signage presages numerous documentary and conceptual photographic series of public signs by other artists. Notable examples include: Nancy Holt’s California Sun

Signs (1972), 126 snapshots of banal signs containing the word “sun”;76 Carole Condé and Karl

Beveridge’s Cultural Signs (1975), a series of texts printed on signboards installed in public spaces to probe cultural, political, and ideological issues; Marlene Creates’s Language and Land

Use series executed in Alberta (1993) and Newfoundland (1994), and her comprehensive Signs of Our Times exhibit (2006) of road and tourist destination signs.77 Within this lineage of artistic signage, NETCo’s Quarter-Mile bears a closer affinity to Nice-based Fluxus artist Ben Vautier’s

Terrain vague of 1961. This series consisted of signed and dated placards bearing the words

“waste land” written in French. He placed the signs in nondescript, vacant, or undeveloped locales.78 Building upon Vautier’s naming and claiming of sites as works of art through signage, the Baxters inserted their signs not only in the realm of art but also that of popular culture, technology, public space, national infrastructure, and the Canadian landscape imagination.

To return to PEI, the artists’ signs further arrest the passerby’s attention with their conspicuously anachronistic appearance. These objects were of a simple and quaint design, in contrast with mass-produced, garish highway billboards and brightly coloured, modern traffic signs. NETCo’s boards were attached to narrow, rough-hewn, wooden posts, mounted onto

76 On Holt’s series, see Alena J. Williams, Introduction to Nancy Holt: Sightlines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 26.

77 See Marlene Creates: Signs of Our Time (Halifax, NS: Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery, 2006).

78 On Vautier’s Terrain vague series as a contribution to land art, see “Annotated Checklist of the Exhibition,” in Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, organized by Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2012), 246. 112 small, block-shaped plinths placed on the earth. This series of rustic sculptural objects was also reminiscent of a triptych of paintings. Each thin white board bore the same manually lettered print. By the era of the work’s creation, these placards would have appeared as outdated remnants of signage conventions and viewing practices originating in the first half of the 20th century. Sequentially ordered commercial signs were once a common, eye-catching feature of

North American roadsides. A notable example of this phenomenon was the long-standing

Burma-Shave serial sign advertising campaign originating in 1925. NETCo’s work reprises this campaign’s aim to “[give] the motorist . . . a personal, emotional relationship with the signs.”79

The Burma-Vita Corporation marketed Burma-Shave across the United States in series of small road signs intended to be read consecutively along the two-lane rural highways that predated multi-lane superhighways. Each sign presented a few words such that, when read in sequence, the five or six placards formed a memorable jingle: “Big mistake / many make / rely on horn / instead of / brake/ Burma-Shave” [figure 13]. In the post-war era, the construction of superhighways ushered in denser traffic and higher speed limits requiring signs that were easier to see and read. Sets of small road signs were no longer viable and gradually gave way to the large unitary billboard so that by 1963, Burma-Shave had ceased its sign campaign.80 The 1960s thus marked a transitional period in roadside viewing and signage. NETCo’s revival of newly obsolete serial placards on a gravel, dual-lane route suspended the view in a time warp while making a personal appeal to the beholder’s recollections and reconstructions of a recent past.

Furthermore, the artists’ road signs beckon motorists to reclaim viewing as a form of aesthetic appreciation and recreation often denied by accelerated highway travel. John Steinbeck

79 “Signs of the Times,” Burma-Shave Exhibition, William F. Eisner Museum of Advertising & Design, accessed June 1, 2008, http://www.eisnermuseum.org/_burma_shave/signs_of_the_times.html. Site discontinued.

80 On serial road sign advertising, see Janet F. Davidson and Michael S. Sweeney, On the Move: Transportation and the American Story (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, Smithsonian Institution, 2003), 273. 113 observed the difficulties of visually appreciating roadside scenery while barreling down new superhighways or “thruways” in the early sixties. His travel memoir recounted the harrowing experience of navigating a thruway as a maelstrom of sound and motion. In nautical terms, he described feeling and hearing “the buffeting, sometimes staggering blows of the gale,” “a wind like the blow of a fist,” unleashed by the giant swarm of “roaring” vehicles. Traffic signs

“screamed” the terse orders “Do not stop! No stopping. Maintain speed.”81 Vehicles and highway signs vied for the beleaguered driver’s attention, crowding his already narrow visual field. The thruway’s onslaught to the senses ironically resulted in a form of visual deprivation, a blindness to the diversity of local roadside views, landmarks, and communities. Steinbeck observed that driving conditions on the thruway rendered the pleasurable “inspection of a countryside” nearly impossible. As he lamented, “No roadside stands selling squash juice, no antique stores, no farm products or factory outlets. When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.”82 To this list of evanescent non-views one might add serial signs bearing humourous or rhyming advertising slogans. With the expansion of superhighways, leisurely visual “inspection” of window-bound views along scenic routes or small back roads developed into an anxious, high-speed serial vision riveted to potentially more dangerous road conditions and a barrage of signs. The practical thruway promised mobility unimpeded by impractical window-gazing, the expedience of road travel without the enjoyment of a road trip. Through the signs in PEI, NETCo paid homage to an earlier era of recreational “inspection” by encouraging motorists to “start viewing” at their own pace and according to their own whims.

81 John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America (New York: Viking Press, 1962; New York: Penguin, 2002), 70. Page references are to the 2002 edition.

82 Ibid., 70.

114

The signs’ ambiguous instructions coax an eclectic array of interpretations to figuratively flesh out the meaning of the site. Unlike the signs which hollered commands at Steinbeck,

NETCo’s instructions offer vague, open-ended suggestions devoid of specifications for viewing.

These textual bookends bound the site without shaping its contents. NETCo’s language prompts personal interpretations, random associations, and diversified viewing practices to formulate a subjective, conceptual model of the view. Despite the pompous, official sounding orders, viewers are at liberty to drive past or take a closer look before drawing their own conclusions.

Anonymous, generic lettering, along with the absence of any familiar logo, advertising slogan, or standard traffic guidelines and symbols, further encourage a multiplicity of readings. Nebulous instructions also favour an inquisitive, roving look at the overall content of the window over a frontal stare at a restricted area. Seizing upon this expanded scope of viewing, Lippard compared

NETCo’s approach to seeing with that of Impressionism. She elaborated that Impressionist painting “had a non-hierarchical view of nature—the comprehensive broad glance or scan instead of the single focus, sharing the vagueness of natural perception,”83 thereby accurately encapsulating NETCo’s deliberate omission of guidelines for either the accuracy or manner of seeing, reading, and behaving on the highway. This artwork thus also broached the surprising imprecision and inconsistency in official criteria for drivers’ visual acuity. Studies conducted in the early 1970s to the 1980s concluded that government requirements for vision on the road in

Western nations were often “purely arbitrary,” varying according to country or even state.84

83 Lippard, “Iain Baxter: New Spaces,” 3.

84 S.P. Taylor and R.V. North, “Vision Requirements for Drivers of Vehicles on Public Roads: Are We Rigorous Enough?” in Vision in Vehicles: Proceedings of the Conference on Vision in Vehicles, Nottingham, United Kingdom, September 9 – 13, 1985, ed. A.G. Gale, M.H. Freeman, C.M. Haslegrave, P. Smith, and S.P. Taylor (Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers B.V., 1986), 8. 115

By giving free rein to viewers, NETCo subversively defied the official function of highway traffic signage. Ordinarily, the abbreviated texts and symbols of signs direct and coordinate the movement of vehicles through the authoritative language of the state. Curator

Derek Knight has aptly underlined that NETCo’s series of quarter-mile works from 1969 exposed the language of power conveyed by signs within the highly regulated and policed network of roads and highways.85 French theorist Paul Virilio made a related, expanded argument that the implementing of toll systems and speed limits are “acts of government, in other words of the political control of the highway, aiming precisely at limiting the

‘extraordinary power of assault’ that motorization of the masses creates.”86

The PEI signs demarcate a venue for citizens’ personal creativity, a temporary respite from the social conditioning instilled by state traffic signs. Through these texts, the artists flouted the official function of signs to produce a conformist community of road users obeying strictly defined orders conveyed by a recognized set of conventional symbols and words. This artwork therefore represents a response to an earlier attack on authoritarian signage in What on Earth!

(1966), an animated film produced by the National Film Board of Canada. The film satirizes both signage and the frenzied mobility of sixties car culture by presenting the ethnographic observations of Martians scrutinizing the Earth from space. Impressed by the crowds of automobiles incessantly moving across the face of the planet, extraterrestrial scientists assume that the vehicles must be the Earthlings. The Martian observers therefore also mistake the global network of road signs for “curiously designed libraries” for the betterment of the busy

85 Derek Knight, N.E. Thing Co.: The Ubiquitous Concept (Oakville, ON: Oakville Galleries, 1995), 25. On the history of billboards, the signage industry, and the development of mobile markets in the United States, see Catherine Gudis, Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape (London: Routledge, 2004).

86 Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(s), 1986), 27. 116

Earthlings. Alien researchers marvel that accessible “education is everywhere” in the form of texts, symbols, and images lining the roads. However, the Martians concede that this is a relentless, “feverish education” and conclude dismally that “by every angle and by every means, the Earthling is being conditioned.”87 Such roadside schools had actual (yet less sinister) counterparts in what journalist Alexander Wilson has dubbed the “environment[s] of instruction” originating in the early 1930s.88 These scenic tourist routes, strategically landscaped to appeal to motorists’ sight, included road signs at regular intervals indicating distances traveled and local geographical or historical facts.89 Whereas the film satirically depicts the highway and roadside as an authoritarian dystopia of mindless mobility, NETCo endorsed a participatory educational model in which beholders relinquished settled viewing habits and exercised interpretive abilities by drawing from private and public meanings to devise their own views.

Site Sensitivity

The artists’ use of framing devices coupled pedagogy with research into how behaviours and attitudes shaped conceptions of sites. According to Iain Baxter, as paraphrased by curator

Marie L. Fleming, the Quarter-Mile work was a “sociological” inquiry into the “behavioral habits of ‘driving or walking by,’ of looking keenly at designated points of interest.”90 In another interview, the artist reaffirmed that the work delved into human responses to scenery. He explained that “it’s nice to define [the act of looking at landscape] as a specific thing, and [to] do

87 What on Earth!, DVD, directed by Les Drew and Kaj Pindal (1966; Montreal: National Film Board of Canada, 2006).

88 Alexander Wilson, The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1991), 35.

89 These scenic routes, enhanced by educational signage, began with the public works projects of the New Deal era, a notable example being the Blue Ridge Parkway in the southern Appalachians (ibid., 34-35).

90 Marie L. Fleming, Baxter²: Any Choice Works 1965-1970 (includes a paraphrase of an interview with Iain Baxter) (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1982), 48. 117 it,”91 thereby implying that the work was a staged experiment, an example of the artists’ field work. The artists’ perception of their works as research derived from their self-proclaimed roles, announced in the Company’s “Operations Statement” of 1968, as the “N.E. Thing researchers” who “seek to add to the world’s store of knowledge” about the “Visual Unknown.” Their activities consisted of “probings of the why and how of visual things.”92 Roadsides were apt venues to probe, since as art historian Nancy Shaw has noted, “highways either subordinate or construct experiences of landscape . . . .”93 Throughout the late sixties, the artists volunteered as sightseeing test subjects by taking “Sunday drives” during which they observed and documented banal spots in and around Vancouver,94 such as the scene in View.

NETCo’s investigations may be classified within the purview of “hodology.” Also referred to as “odology,” this area of study examines how attitudes, values, motives, and tastes determine a traveler’s selection of both route and destination. Such research was established by the sixties.95 The Baxters’ inquiry into viewers’ construction of roadsides also dovetails with landscape historian John Brinckerhoff Jackson’s definition of odology as the study of the history,

91 Baxter, [Untitled interview], 22.

92 N.E. Thing Company, “N.E. Thing Company Operations Statement,” 1968, quoted in Lippard, “Iain Baxter: New Spaces,” 3.

93 Nancy Shaw, “Siting the Banal: The Expanded Landscapes of the N.E. Thing Co.,” in You Are Now in the Middle of a N.E. Thing Co. Landscape: Works by Iain and Ingrid Baxter, 1965-1971 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Fine Arts Gallery, 1993), 29.

94 Ibid., 28.

95 “Exploratory” and “habitual” locomotion are major topics in hodology. See Brian Goodey, Perception of the Environment: An Introduction to the Literature (Birmingham, UK: Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, University of Birmingham, 1971), 33-34. 118 form, and function of all routes and paths, including roads, streets, and highways,96 as well as

“human and emotional response[s]” to movement along public routes.97

By delving into viewers’ formation of subjective conceptions of site, the N.E. Thing researchers contributed to a model of site arising in the mid to late 1960s in the emergent multidisciplinary field of environmental perception studies, which included hodology. Before further elaboration upon this model, a definition of this academic field is necessary on account of both the eclecticism of this research and its absence from art historical literature. This field yielded a prolific output of research on preferences for, ideas about, attitudes toward, and mobility in sundry environments, whether urban, rural, indoor, outdoor, or architectural. Lacking a unified, coherent set of guiding methodological tenets, environmental perception studies loosely regrouped specialists from geography, psychology, architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, hazard studies, land management, forestry, marketing research, resource management, as well as researchers investigating leisure, recreation, and tourism.98 Some of these disciplines, geography in particular, splintered into specialized areas.99 The peak of

NETCo’s fascination with signs as in situ framing objects coincided with the appearance in 1969

96 John Brinckerhoff Jackson, A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 191- 192.

97 Ibid., 198.

98 For a listing of North American, European, and Australian publications, most of which range from 1967 to 1971, see John Marsh, Scenery Evaluation and Landscape Perception: A Bibliography [Exchange bibliography #304] (Monticello, IL: Council of Planning Librarians, August 1972). For research from the 1950s and 1960s, with some earlier works, see James D. Harrison, An Annotated Bibliography on Environmental Perception with Emphasis on Urban Areas [Exchange bibliography #93] (Monticello, IL: Council of Planning Librarians, August 1969). For a recent Canadian case study of roadside viewing, see José Froment and Gérald Domon, “Viewer Appreciation of Highway Landscapes: The Contribution of Ecologically Managed Embankments in Quebec, Canada,” Landscape and Urban Planning 78 (2006): 14-32.

99 To this list, geographer Brian Goodey added the following as contemporary scholarly currents indirectly relevant to environmental perception: phenomenology, structuralist anthropology, and communications studies, including the “popularized ideas of McLuhan.” Meanwhile, Goodey also noted the frequent lack of dialogue in the 1960s between researchers from different disciplines working on similar issues as well as the occasional lack of exchange between academics and planners. See Goodey, Perception of the Environment: An Introduction to the Literature, 2, 10. 119 of significant environmental perception publications such as the first volumes of both the

Journal of Leisure Research and Environment and Behavior, and later, humanist geographer Yi- fu Tuan’s landmark Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values of

1974.100

Overlapping with the themes of NETCo’s work, numerous hodological, empirical, and statistical studies evaluated the aesthetic visual qualities of roadside environments and the complexity of serial vision on the highway. Such research aimed to solve practical land planning or design-related problems, including the enhancement of commuters’ visual experiences of highways passing through urban sprawl or the drafting of marketing strategies for campgrounds and other recreational roadside sites appealing to particular demographics. For example, one of the earliest and most important studies of vision on the highway, The View from the Road (1964) by Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch, and John R Myer, promoted the design of orderly, spatially coherent, and attractive sequences of variegated roadside vistas [figure 14].101 NETCo might also have been inspired by environmental perception researchers’ use of optical devices to record and compare test subjects’ responses to highway scenery. In 1969, Stephen Carr and Dale Schissler conducted a follow-up study to The View from the Road in which they analyzed the formation of memories of the city by equipping drivers with head-mounted Polymetric eye-movement

100 See Journal of Leisure Research 1:1 (Winter 1969), Environment and Behavior 1:1 (June 1969), and Yi-fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice- Hall, 1974). Although their work is not discussed here, two of the most influential scholars in environmental perception in the 1960s are geographer David Lowenthal and environmental psychologist Kenneth Craik.

101 Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch, and John R. Myer, The View from the Road (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), 20. For other studies of highway serial vision, see also Elwood L. Shafer Jr., “Perception of Natural Environments,” Environment and Behavior 1:1 (June 1969): 71-82, and Gary H. Winkel, Roger Malek, and Philip Thiel, “The Role of Personality Differences in Judgments of Roadside Quality,” Environment and Behavior 1, no. 2 (December 1969): 199-223.

120 recorders attached to a 16 mm movie camera.102 Appleyard and his colleagues employed movie cameras, mirrors, and mobile periscopes to recreate the experience of serial vision.103

Both NETCo and environmental perception researchers upheld the aesthetic appreciation of roadside viewing. Just as NETCo insisted that their roadside interventions were both research and art, the authors of The View from the Road considered their documentary films as both scientific records and artworks.104 In a passage equally pertinent to the Quarter-Mile work,

Appleyard, Lynch, and Myer enthused that “road-watching is a delight, and the highway is—or at least might be—a work of art.”105 This conviction inspired an exhibition of 1970 entitled The

Highway, which included photographs of a NETCo Quarter-Mile installation. In the catalogue, historian of American art John W. McCoubrey mused that the highway was “an unconscious earth art” preceding the earthworks of Smithson, Heizer, and Oppenheim.106 His remark implicitly likened the vastness and linearity of highways with the monumentality and geometric forms of earthworks, both of which afford complex experiences of time and space.

In drawing upon environmental perception studies, my main intention is to delineate the contours of a conceptual and subjective model of site in the sixties arising both in examples of this research and NETCo’s sign-based art. Significantly, neither the researchers nor the artists

102 Stephen Carr and Dale Schissler, “The City as a Trip: Perceptual Selection and Memory in The View From the Road,” Environment and Behavior 1:1 (June 1969): 7-35. Meanwhile, another 1969 experiment used images reminiscent of the photographs documenting the Quarter-Mile work. Participants evaluated slides of photographs taken at regular 300 foot intervals along a road by a camera angled to simulate the car passengers’ field of vision. See Gary H. Winkel, Roger Malek, and Philip Thiel, “The Role of Personality Differences in Judgments of Roadside Quality,” Environment and Behavior 1:2 (December 1969): 208-209.

103 Appleyard, Lynch, and Myer, The View from the Road, 20.

104Ibid, 20.

105 Ibid., 3.

106 John W. McCoubrey, “Art and the Road,” in The Highway (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, in association with the University of Pennsylvania, 1970), 22.

121 denied the materiality of sites. Rather, both camps dismissed the notion of a site as being uniquely a physical locale independent from the presence and mental activity of a subject. Much like NETCo, researchers turned from this model of an original, a priori site to instead posit site as a visual and conceptual entity informed by viewers’ personal dispositions, preferences, states of consciousness, and cultural references. Furthermore, such studies clarified that viewers of automobile landscapes were not anonymous drivers and passengers but rather were distinct in class, gender, and age.

As demonstrated by viewers’ diverse encounters with the ambiguous texts, NETCo constructed a subjective, conceptual model of site irreducible to any monolithic notion of an autonomous place. This distinction between the a priori site and a site contingent upon sight, thought, and memory was a central premise of environmental perception research and, in particular, of studies of roadside serial vision as developed by the following scholars. These authors underscored that ideas, personal biases, and expectations informed viewers’ responses to landscapes, and further, that spontaneous responses incorporated attitudes formed prior to even viewing a given site. (Although these scholars preferred the expansive term “environment,” they nonetheless referred to subjects’ interactions with particular sites and views.) In 1975, geographer Jay Appleton defined the methodological foundation of studying human interactions with landscape by invoking the fissure between the elusive ideal of a pre-existing, supposedly authentic site and the subject’s variable ideas about that site: “Behaviour, in fact, is influenced by a person’s attitude towards the environment, not as it is, but as he thinks it is. In other words, the image of an environment is what counts, and this image may be distorted in all sorts of ways.”107

Geographer Brian Goodey had employed similar terms in 1971 to justify the importance of

107 Jay Appleton, The Experience of Landscape (London: John Wiley & Sons, 1975), 53. My emphasis added. 122 environmental perception studies. He stressed that “[d]ecision-makers operating in the environment base their decisions on the environment as they see it and not as it is . . . .”108

It is notable that NETCo, Appleton, and Goodey shared the notion of site as a fluid image filtered through the individual’s thought and thus potentially warped by bias or caprice. Attitudes and behaviours motivating scenery-viewing are not impartial and views not predefined.109

NETCo’s ambiguous instructions preclude norms for accurate or proper viewing. The ideal of an authentic site encountered “as it is” emerges as untenable in both NETCo’s art and the geographers’ findings. Whereas the artists pursued the aesthetic and subversive possibilities of personal serial vision, both geographers obliquely warned of the potential harm arising from an excessively distorted image of the natural environment. The conception of site as shaped by viewers’ acquired preferences and learned prejudices had surfaced in a 1969 study by Elwood L.

Shafer who investigated how recreationists learned to view a site according to previous exposure to stock landscape imagery.110 Another study of the same year conducted by Gary H. Winkel, an environmental psychologist, and architects Roger Malek and Philip Thiel, established the psychological foundations of roadside viewing by devising a set of “environmental personality scales.” The authors’ questionnaires assessed test subjects’ aesthetic judgments of, and visual preferences for, roadside development projects. Compiled data revealed “a set of attitudes”

108 Brian Goodey, Perception of the Environment: An Introduction to the Literature (Birmingham, UK: Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, University of Birmingham, 1971), 1. My emphasis added.

109 In pointing out the possibility of misreading sites, the geographers implied the notion of a wide range in the relevance and ethical content of mental images and attitudes toward natural scenery.

110 Elwood L. Shafer Jr., “Perception of Natural Environments,” Environment and Behavior 1:1 (June 1969): 79. For an assessment of Shafer’s quantification methods, see A. A. Carlson, “On the Possibility of Quantifying Scenic Beauty,” Landscape Planning 4 (1977): 131-172.

123 toward roadside sites, in other words, a range of environmental personality profiles. 111 Without explicitly designating their work as a study of environmental perception, Marshall McLuhan and

Canadian painter and communications scholar Harley Parker made a relevant contribution to this body of research in 1968 by maintaining that mainstream models of sight and practices of representing space in Western art were culturally diverse and imposed by the dominant culture and class in a given society.112 In tandem with these contemporaneous studies, NETCo’s work shed doubt on both the notion of a pre-existing site and objective, detached ways of seeing.

Through strategic signage, the artists shifted the view from the domain of the purely sensory to that of the “sensitive,” a term recurring in environmental perception research. The senses, broadly defined, are the faculties primarily responsible for receiving, filtering, and reacting to physical stimuli and other information about the outside world and the condition of the body. However, one particular definition of “sensitiveness” bears directly on “mental feelings” of the kind sought by the artists from attentive viewers. This definition is distinct from, for instance, the physiological sensitivity of human skin and certain plant species, the responsiveness of photographic materials to light, or the attunement of finely calibrated measuring devices to sudden changes in external stimuli. The term of relevance to NETCo’s work designates a mental or emotional faculty characterized as “having quick and acute

111 Gary H. Winkel, Roger Malek, and Philip Thiel, “The Role of Personality Differences in Judgments of Roadside Quality,” Environment and Behavior 1:2 (December 1969): 213-218. This set of attitudes was partly informed by information and opinions obtained from newspapers, magazines, and roadside council documents, on one hand, and attitudes towards art, aesthetics, and urban design, on the other.

112 Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 9-10.

124 sensibilities.”113 Such “sensitiveness” is a “keen susceptibility to impressions, [a] delicacy or keenness of feeling” occasionally developed to an exceptional degree.114

NETCo’s creation, through the signs, of a mass audience of sensitive viewers aligned with endeavours by environmental perception researchers to hone public sensitivity to sites through group experiments. As Goodey wrote, this training sought to stimulate an “increased awareness, or sensitivity, towards problems in the environment.”115 Just as NETCo employed framing strategies to encourage the motorized public to delve into an active, thoughtful encounter with the window view, researchers and planners envisioned group sensitivity training as a means of enabling members of the public to increase critical awareness of their surroundings, conceive of creative responses to quotidian sites, and articulate concerns regarding town planning decisions and landscaping projects.116 Proponents of the mission to start viewing sensitively thus strove to empower users of public space. Some researchers emphasized the potential applicability of “sensitivity groups,” also termed “T (training) groups.” These collectives participated in activities, with or without a facilitator’s guidance, designed to enable participants to gain insight into their feelings and acts while also learning about the social interactions within the group. Sensitivity group methods originated in the National Training

Laboratories in Bethel, Maine. Inspired by child education techniques and research in social interaction and group dynamics, T group practices often resembled experiments in applied game theory.117 The methodologies behind such activities frequently overlapped with those of the

113 Oxford English Dictionary, 1989 ed., s.v. “sensitive.”

114 Oxford English Dictionary, 1989 ed., s.v. “sensitiveness.”

115 Goodey, Perception of the Environment, 63.

116 Ibid., 67.

125 uninhibited “encounter group” in which participants quested for a vaguely defined “personal growth” and self-enhancement through group therapy. Encounter groups had become a ubiquitous and often controversial subject in publications and practices in psychology and psychiatry as of the late sixties.118

In this context, NETCo’s work represented a minimally directed, artistic variation of a sensitivity group comprised of unsuspecting participants prompted to craft personalized conceptions of the view. Rather than interact with each other, subjects engage with the site via framing devices. In lieu of the authoritarian commands and “feverish education” of traffic signs, the artists invented playfully suggestive cues and thereby transformed viewing into a game.

Critics were quick to notice in the late sixties that NETCo’s land art and landscape-themed works constituted a game-like, populist project to foster the viewing public’s sensitivity to everyday sites. Charlotte Townsend of The Vancouver Sun wrote in 1969 that the Company

“addresse[d] itself to ‘the many millions of people who see,’ asking them only to look.”119 Her remark extended NETCo’s art from a specialized T group to a communal exercise in seeing practices. The Baxters counted themselves amongst this sea of viewers, baptizing their North

Vancouver home (which doubled as a studio) the “Seymour Plant,” a homophone of “see-more plant.”120 Lippard interpreted the recurrence of driving in the Baxters’ art as an appropriation of a typical “parlor car game” in which players pass the time during a car trip by pointing out features

117 Ibid., 63-65. Also see R. T. Golumbiewski and A. Blumberg, eds., Sensitivity Training and the Laboratory Approach (Itasca, IL: F. E. Peacock, 1970).

118 See Robert H. Easton, Robert J. Carr, and John M. Whiteley, “Issues in the Encounter Group Movement,” The Counseling Psychologist 3 (1972): 89-120.

119 Townsend, “N.E. Thing Goes Across Canada.”

120 Shaw, “Siting the Banal,” 27. 126 in the landscape as resembling familiar objects or works of art.121 She later recollected that an upbeat curiosity pervaded NETCo’s land and landscape-themed art and asserted that “in [the

Baxters’] role of ‘Visual Informers,’ they were tourist guides rather than didacts. They pointed out: Hey! Look at that!”122 The artists confirmed this reading of the ludic impulse in their work and unintentionally reinforced the overlap between the Quarter-Mile and sensitivity group techniques by professing that “Playfulness is the highest form of living. Play is how we work, and our works are the result of play.”123

In addition, the road signs’ eliciting of viewer participation in an adaptation of the sensitivity group built upon Iain Baxter’s experimental pedagogical techniques of “visual or sensory art instruction” developed in the 1960s while he was a fine arts professor. The PEI work’s engendering of creative, improvisational visual encounters with sites extended Baxter’s teaching which used slide projections, films, and performances to guide students’ development of “heightened empathy and aesthetic sensitivity” to the visual.124 While drivers and passengers ensconced in vehicles were cut off from sounds emanating from the field outside, Baxter’s art students also honed their visual sensitivity in settings temporarily deprived of certain sounds. His teaching strove to illuminate the visual by silencing a particular type of sound: human speech. As of 1966, he implemented speechless teaching methods incorporating visual aids at Ohio State

University, Washington State University, and later, at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby,

121 Lippard, “Iain Baxter: New Spaces,” 5.

122 Lucy R. Lippard, “You Are Now in the Middle of a Revisionist History of the N.E. Thing Co.,” in You Are Now in the Middle of a N.E. Thing Co. Landscape: Works by Iain and Ingrid Baxter, 1965-1971 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Fine Arts Gallery, 1993), 59.

123 N.E. Thing Company, “N.E. Thing Co., Ltd.” interview by Alvin Balkind, in 17 Canadian Artists: A Protean View (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1976), n.p.

124 Iain Baxter, “Purpose of Study: Visual or Sensory Art Instruction,” course syllabus, 1969, Unit General- 5, 1969, Box 10, File 2, Iain Baxter Fonds CA OTAG SC064, E.P. Taylor Research Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

127

British Columbia. At SFU, Baxter developed an art instruction with painter Joel Smith in which gestures and non-verbal sounds replaced speech, traditionally the main sound animating and directing a class. The standard lesson bloomed into a “happening in the classroom.”125 In a first- year Simon Fraser course co-taught with composer Doug Muir in the late sixties, Baxter taught silently, orchestrating through gestures to fix the attention of students primed to “start viewing.”

For instance, Baxter, garbed only in bathing trunks, lead a class during which he poured water into a pail and pantomimed swimming on the floor [figure 15].126

Along the road, NETCo invented a learning environment in which the dampening of sound increased visual sensitivity to the framed view. Motorists coast through a relatively muted spectacle in a sparsely populated rural area while car windows and noises inside vehicles muffle and even drown out sounds from the roadside. Appleyard, Lynch, and Myer observed that drivers, constrained by the physical armature of their vehicles, necessarily privileged sight above other senses as a means to gauge relative speeds and driving progress.127 Auditory cues are generally less useful for spatial orientation on the road,128with the notable exceptions of rail crossing alarms and honking horns.

125 Matthew Baigell and Joel Smith, “Happening in the Classroom: Non-Verbal Art Instruction,” Art Journal 25 (Summer 1966): 370.

126 R. Murray Schafer, “Cleaning the Lenses of Perception,” Artscanada 25 (October/November 1968): 10-11. A photograph of the artist swimming is in Unit General-5, 1969, Box 10, File 2, Iain Baxter Fonds CA OTAG SC064, E.P. Taylor Research Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. In the fall of 1970, Baxter also incorporated more standard verbal teaching methods and reading and studio assignments in his course “Visual Studies: Fundamentals of Art.” See Iain Baxter, “Visual Studies: Fundamentals of Art,” course syllabus, 1970, “Fundamentals of Art/Visual Studies Outline” folder, 1970, Box 15, File 8, Iain Baxter Fonds CA OTAG SC064, E.P. Taylor Research Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

127 Appleyard, Lynch, and Myer, The View from the Road, 8-12.

128 Ibid., 4. As the authors note on the same page, touch is the second most used sense in driving as it allows the driver some agency over the functioning of the vehicle. 128

The “start” and “stop” road signs consolidated earlier themes and techniques of Baxter’s visual art instruction. In 1966, Baxter and Joel Smith conducted a studio course at Simon Fraser

University devoted to the theme of “war” by projecting slides of graphic images including a photograph of a car upon which one of the artists had painted an eye.129 Whereas NETCo would later foster the accessible and participatory possibilities of roadside viewing via in situ art,

Baxter’s unblinking, all-seeing car presented a concise visual metaphor for both the omnipresent technological surveillance of public spaces and the mechanized upheaval of natural sites required for the construction of those thoroughfares. Supplementing arresting images, Baxter and Smith energized the classroom atmosphere by blasting recordings of John Cage’s compositions and setting objects on fire. The instructors concluded this unsettling lesson on bellicose visual culture by uttering the sole words heard throughout the class—“start” and “stop.” These instructions, in writing, would initiate free-form roadside viewing. However, unlike the viewers of the Quarter-

Mile, the art students had received general instructions prior to the course regarding how to respond to these commands. Upon being told to “start,” students were to move at ease about the classroom, create artworks inspired by the spectacle just witnessed, and then cease work once ordered to “stop.”130 The PEI work thus reprised the pedagogical format and aims of Baxter’s educational experiments, transmuting the roadside and the highway into an autodidactic, open-air lesson in viewing.

The semantic content of the signs framing the Quarter-Mile view resonated with Baxter’s consistent inquiry into visual sensitivity at the newly opened Simon Fraser University. From

1966 to 1971, he was associate professor and resident in visual arts at the University’s Centre for

129 Baigell and Smith, “Happening in the Classroom,” 370-371.

130 Ibid., 370-371. 129

Communications and the Arts.131 The Centre’s interdisciplinary curriculum coupled visual art with musical performance and composition. Composer and Centre faculty member R. Murray

Schafer (b. 1933, Sarnia, Ontario) summarized the program’s mission as “cleaning the lenses of perception.”132 Despite the program’s avowed multi-sensorial methodology, Schafer’s choice of a metaphor from ophthalmology and optics betrayed the lingering hold of sight upon the language and thought of artists in the late sixties. The Centre sought to eventually reunify all forms of sensory experience and thus arrive at a sensory and psychic state which Schafer likened to a child’s supposedly holistic perception of the world as a “kaleidoscopic and synaesthetic fluid.” 133 Although NETCo’s landscape art generally focused on the cultural aspects of sight, the artists also drew from the Centre’s overarching dialogue about sensitivity. In the general first- year “Sensitivity” course, invited guests gathered with students to discuss an individual sense from multiple disciplinary perspectives. A physiologist, psychologist, painter, and architect directed a session devoted to sight while a cosmetician and “pestologist” lead the meeting about smell.134

One notable West Coast educational adaptation of the T group shared NETCo’s mission to refine sensitive responses to outdoor sites through playful group activities, often involving practices of seeing in silence. Urban landscape architect Lawrence Halprin and his wife, modern dance choreographer and performer Ann Halprin, organized two interdisciplinary summer

131 The University had opened in 1965. Iain Baxter later obtained masters degrees in teaching secondary education and painting. For complete information on his education, see Iain Baxter, Curriculum Vitae, undated, N.E. Thing Co. Artist File, 1965-1975, Vancouver Art Gallery Library and Archives. The designing of new theories and practices of teaching was central to both halves of NETCo in their roles as “visual informers” and in their individual training: by the close of the seventies, Ingrid Baxter completed an MA in physical education. See Fleming, Baxter²: Any Choice Works 1965-1970, 10-11.

132 Schafer, “Cleaning the Lenses of Perception,” 10.

133 Ibid., 12.

134 Ibid., 12. 130 workshops in San Francisco, “Experiments in Environment” held in 1966 and “Exercises in

Environment” in 1968. The Halprins explored a wider range of embodied experiences than the

Baxters. In a statement complementing the objective of the N.E. Thing researchers to vault into the visual unknown, the Halprins explained that their T groups aimed to “explore a new range of experience in avant-garde environmental arts.” Selected sites were to be “evaluated through . . . intuitive modes of perception including kinesthetics, body participation, and other exploratory techniques of perception.”135 Both of these nearly month-long events were attended by two groups with radically different understandings of the body’s relation to site: a troupe of dancers led by Ann Halprin and a group of professionals and graduate students in architecture and urban planning.136

The Halprins organized a series of daily collaborative activities designed to increase participants’ spatial awareness and creativity through imaginative uses and interpretations of diverse sites. Daily sessions required group members to adopt new ways of beholding and occupying sites including a beach, city streets, a public square, and the Fillmore West

Auditorium. Specific tasks included walking while blindfolded to analyze ambient sounds and topographies, watching scenery without speaking to other group members, living outdoors for days, and building a miniature city out of driftwood (resembling a land art sculpture) on a beach in silence [figures 16, 17, and 18].137 In a written course evaluation, an architect participant

135 Ann Halprin and Lawrence Halprin, quoted in James T. Burns, Jr., “Experiments in Environment,” Progressive Architecture 48 (July 1967): 132.

136 Similar to the interdisciplinary teaching teams at the Simon Fraser Centre for Communications and the Arts, the Halprins’ workshops also regrouped instructors of various backgrounds including architecture, geography, film, design, and music. See Burns, Jr., “Experiments in Environment,”132. Also in attendance at the 1968 workshop was the Halprins’ daughter, Daria, who later starred in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Zabriskie Point (1970). On “Exercises in Environment,” see David Lloyd-Jones, “Lawrence Halprin: Eco-architect,” Horizon 12 (Summer 1970): 54.

137 Burns, Jr., “Experiments in Environment,” 130-137, and Lloyd-Jones, “Lawrence Halprin: Eco-architect,” 54. 131 concluded that “Experiments in Environment” had successfully fostered an increased bodily awareness of, and “emotional sensitivity” to, sites.138

In their writings and interviews, NETCo branched out from the Halprins’ exploratory perceptual techniques by linking sensitivity with the concept of “information.” The artists thus specified the nonmaterial view as intangible data to be sifted through, organized, and analyzed.

During this process, the viewer not only takes in sensory information but also produces new knowledge about a site through his or her mental and emotional sensitivity. As of the late 1960s, the term “information” gained currency, especially in conceptual art and process art inspired by mathematical information theory, semiotics, cybernetics, telecommunications, library science, archiving, informatics, and information technology. This artistic exploration of information coincided with the publication in 1968 of a revised English edition of Information Theory and

Esthetic Perception by physicist and social psychologist Abraham Moles.139 In 1970, NETCo was featured in the watershed Information exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, a comprehensive regrouping of works by conceptual and earthworks artists, as well as Joseph

Beuys, Yoko Ono, Vito Acconci, and Jeff Wall.140

The influence of conceptual art aside, NETCo drew from their own unique, inclusive definition of “information” to conceive of the site as a mass of intangible data to be given meaning. Iain Baxter claimed that the world (and therefore all sites and spaces) comprised a bundle of information.141 However, not all information was necessarily germane to the concept

138 Ibid., (includes citations from group participants), 137.

139 See Abraham Moles, Information Theory and Esthetic Perception, trans. Joel Cohen, 2nd ed. (Champaign- Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968).

140 For NETCo’s contribution of documentary photographs and texts to the exhibition, see Kynaston L. McShine, Information (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970), 88-91.

141 Fleming, Baxter²: Any Choice Works 1965-1970, (includes an interview with Iain Baxter), 36. 132 of sensitivity. NETCo distinguished “Sensitivity Information,” abbreviated to SI, as potentially endowed with artistic value or creative significance. The artists mapped subsets of SI in an official NETCo “Nomenclature” reprinted throughout the sixties and seventies in catalogues and pamphlets. This glossary explained SI as “A term developed by NETCO to denote all forms of cultural activities, i.e. dance, music, theatre, film, fine art, poetry, novels, etc.”142 Given that the members of NETCo regularly appropriated sites, texts, popular technologies, and natural phenomena in their art, SI included not only objects but also ideas, language, and events.

Furthermore, SI primarily derived its status as art from the subject’s sensitive interpretations of information as illustrated by the viewer’s construction of the view. Iain Baxter explained the role of the sensitive subject by asserting that artists and creative non-artists could potentially confer the status of art upon any given information.143 Hence, SI encompassed both the information consumed and the knowledge produced by sensitive subjects. NETCo’s

“Nomenclature” underlined the productive creativity of the subject: “INFORMATION is usually

. . . confronted with and dealt with in either a practical or sensitive manner. Thus

INFORMATION which is handled in this pure or sensitive way culminates in SI. . . .144 In light of this passage, the puzzling road signs in PEI inspire a sensitive confrontation in distinction from the “practical” demands of conventional traffic signs.

The Quarter-Mile view also falls under the subcategory of “Visual Sensitivity

Information.” VSI regrouped “painting, sculpture, architecture, books, etc.,” while NETCo

142 N.E. Thing Co., “N.E. Thing Co. Ltd. – Nomenclature,”1974, N.E. Thing Co. Artist File 1965-1975, Vancouver Art Gallery Library and Archives. While NETCo incorporated the concepts of VSI in many works from the period under discussion, including works consisting of transmitting messages by telex across Canada, I am here only concerned with land art and other forms of site-specific landscape interventions by NETCo.

143 Joan Lowndes, “Iain Baxter – Genius or Mastercrassman,” (includes an interview with Iain Baxter), Vancouver Province, May 16, 1969, 13.

144 N.E. Thing Co., “N.E. Thing Co. Ltd. – Nomenclature.” 133 renamed the visual artist “a VISUAL INFORMER, as someone who knows how to handle visual information sensitively.”145 This ideal of the perceptual educator is kindred to Marshall

McLuhan’s argument that art’s fundamental goal is to train the public’s perception of the world and the impact of new technologies.146 NETCo’s advocacy for the sensitive treatment of sites, redefined as VSI, culminated in a 1973 exhibition of documentary photographs of outdoor performances and land art installations executed in Canada. Revealing an affinity with contemporaneous environmental perception research, the artists presented the exhibition in the guise of a pseudo-scientific display under the sardonically bombastic title of Sensitivity

Information Research by the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd. on Snow, Ice, Water, the North, and the

General Phenomenon of Winter.147

Sensitive treatment of framed, non-material views lead to the refinement of “visual literacy,” a concept implicitly at play in NETCo’s sixties work. This notion arose though the artists’ interaction with McLuhan’s ideas. Sight and space were at the forefront of McLuhan and

Parker’s 1968 book Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting. The co-authors proposed the teleological argument that modern “visual space,” epitomized by geometric perspective in visual art and linear time in thought and literature,148 was being gradually

145 Ibid. Other subcategories of SI include “Sound SI” (music, public speaking, poetry recitals), “Moving SI” (film, dance, sports), and “Experiential SI” (theatre and performance).

146 Marshall McLuhan, “Technology and Environment,” Artscanada 24 (February 1967): 5. According to McLuhan, the arts provide a prophetic, radar-like “environment” which anticipates otherwise imperceptible social and psychic shocks induced by the arrival of new technologies. See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 3rd ed. (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964), x, 65, 243. However, NETCo’s formulation of the visual informer noticeably expands McLuhan’s definition of art’s social function as a means of enabling people to adjust or cope with the effects of technologies by instead making art into a vehicle for critically responding to, and reinventing uses for, existing technologies, such as the car.

147 See NETCo, Sensitivity Information Research by the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd. on Snow, Ice, Water, the North, and the General Phenomena of Winter (Banff, AB: Peter Whyte Gallery, 1973), n.p.

148 McLuhan and Parker, Through the Vanishing Point, 6.

134 succeeded during the “Electronic Age” by “acoustic space” affording multi-sensorial, and especially tactile, experience.149 However, the following discussion aims neither to summarize nor critique McLuhan’s writings on art (a task accomplished by Donald F. Theall in 1971),150 but rather to throw into relief a little-examined area of NETCo’s approach to sight and sites.

As a preface, this analysis returns to and revises critical reception that has often categorized NETCo’s art as an application of McLuhan’s ideas about art and technology. In the mid-sixties, Iain Baxter garnered attention for organizing artistic multimedia performances held during a series of lectures devoted to McLuhan in Vancouver at the University of British

Columbia. Audience member Tom Wolfe heralded the first of these seminal events as a

“McLuhan festival.”151 Writers of the late sixties hailed Iain Baxter as a genuine “McLuhan man”152 with “well McLuhanized” ideas,153 a hip “product of the McLubricated era.”154 Artforum editor Philip Leider quipped that Baxter’s speech and NETCo’s “Official Glossary” of SI were riddled with “terrifying McLuhanesque linguistic horrors.”155 In his detailed mapping of

Canadian artists’ responses to McLuhan’s theories about space, literary scholar Richard Cavell wrote that “One photodocumentation of an [unspecified] N.E. Thing Co. Landscape in fact

149 Ibid., 28.

150 Donald F. Theall, “Through the Vanishing Point: McLuhan and the Sister Arts,” in The Medium is the Rear View Mirror: Understanding McLuhan (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1971), 167-182.

151 On January 30, 1964, Baxter presented a multimedia event in the UBC armory during the first in a series of annual lectures and events held in honour of McLuhan. Wolfe described the performance in detail but did not name Baxter or any of the other performers. See Tom Wolfe, The Pump House Gang (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968), 156-157. In 1965, Baxter helped to organize an art exhibition and performances for “The Medium is the Message,” a second UBC lecture series to which he contributed a work self-descriptively entitled Two Tons of Ice Sculpture: Beauty Through Destruction, Disintegration, and Disappearance.

152 Kay Kritzwiser, “Canada: The Recent Scene,” Arts Magazine (May 1969): 55.

153 Lippard, “Art within the Arctic Circle,” 668.

154 Lippard, “Iain Baxter: New Spaces,” 6.

155 Philip Leider, “Vancouver: Scene with no Scene,” Artscanada 24 (June/July 1967): 7. 135 includes a rear-view mirror in its frame, in homage to McLuhan’s contention that ‘the medium is the rear-view mirror.’”156 As the closing of this section contends, critical readings such as

Cavell’s have focused on NETCo’s appropriations of McLuhan’s oft-quoted ideas and thus elided the artists’ productive engagement with other currents of thought concerning art, technology, and space.

In divergence from such readings of NETCo, I point to the artists’ resistance to aspects of

McLuhan’s often un-art historical thought as revealed in a rarely referenced event of 1966 that probed the issue of sensitive viewing. David P. Silcox, then the visual arts officer for the Canada

Council, recounted that since he was aware of “[Iain] Baxter’s admiration for Marshall

McLuhan, I put him . . . at McLuhan’s table when [McLuhan] was in Vancouver to receive a

Canada Council Prize.”157 This arrangement proved dissatisfying, recalled Silcox, as it became apparent during conversation that McLuhan “did not really understand a number of the issues and ideas that . . . Baxter wanted to discuss with him.” Consequently, “Baxter later sent him

[McLuhan] his famous VIP button which stands for Visually Illiterate Person.”158 The joke is compounded by the near illegibility of the button, a circular black pin embossed with barely

156 Richard Cavell, McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 184. For Cavell’s reading of NETCo’s art as addressing a range of McLuhan’s ideas, see ibid., 182-184. McLuhan and Parker elaborated this point about the rear-view mirror in Through the Vanishing Point: “The artist has the power to discern the current environment created by the latest technology. Ordinary human instinct causes people to recoil from these new environments and to rely on the rear-view mirror as a kind of repeat or ricorso of the preceding environment, thus insuring total disorientation at all times. It is not that there is anything wrong with the old environment, but it simply will not serve as navigational guide to the new one.” See McLuhan and Parker, Through the Vanishing Point, xxiii.

157 David P. Silcox, “An Outside View,” in Vancouver: Art and Artists 1931-1983 (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1983), 154.

158 Ibid., 156. 136 discernable dark letters.159 NETCo would later distribute VIP buttons at a BC architectural convention in May of 1969, shortly before creating the PEI work.160

Not only a personal jab at McLuhan, the button was also on par with the road signs and the official SI glossary as a key text in the development of the artists’ thought about the role of the viewer. The conception of the framed, non-material view at the core of this chapter intersected with the artists’ contemporaneous elaboration of the visually literate person (or VLP),

Iain Baxter’s visual sensitivity art instruction, and the Halprins’ environmental perception T group workshops. With reference to the Quarter-Mile, the VLP embodies the sensitive handler of visual information, one who heeds the call to “start viewing” by open-mindedly considering the content of the road signs and confronting the rolling scenery in the confines of the window.

The goal of visual literacy is not to correctly read and decipher a site as a legible text, but to acquire a creative aptitude in interacting with a site experienced visually. In NETCo’s land art, framing devices of windows and signs mediate visual literacy and shape the site into a view framed by conventions from the history of landscape art, optical instruments, and popular transport; a lot advertised yet not for sale; a fleeting spectacle ubiquitous in sixties road trip culture; a conceptual entity forged in viewers’ minds.

159 A few buttons are preserved in Unit General - 7, 1969, Box 10, File 4, Iain Baxter Fonds CA OTAG SC064,E.P. Taylor Research Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

160 NETCo handed out the VIP buttons at a convention of the Architectural Institute of British Colombia on May 9, 1969. See Lowndes, “Iain Baxter – Genius or Mastercrassman,” 13. 137

CHAPTER TWO: FIGURES 7-18

Images were removed due to copyright restrictions.

Figure 10. N.E. Thing Co., Quarter-Mile N. E. Thing Co. Landscape, Prince Edward Island (detail), 1969. Map and mixed media. 53.5 cm x 81.5 cm. Collection of the artists.

Figure 11. N. E. Thing Co., View, 1967. Cibachrome transparency, light box. 76 cm x 122 cm x 15 cm. Assembled 1995. Collection of the artists. 139

Figure 13. “Big mistake / many make / rely on horn / instead of / brake/ Burma-Shave.” Burma- Vita Corporation road signs advertising Burma-Shave on Route 66, Hackberry, Mohave County, Arizona, pre-1963. Photograph by Ken Koehler. “BurmaShaveSignsRoute66.jpg,” Wikipedia, published 2006, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BurmaShaveSigns_Route66.jpg.

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Figure 14. View of highway traffic as seen from a moving car and reflected in the rear-view mirror. Cover illustration of The View from the Road (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964).

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CHAPTER THREE. CONFLICTING PERSPECTIVES: THE SHORELINE VIEWFINDER OF DEAN ELLIS, 1970-1973

Aquatic Apparitions

The lyrics of the song “Cymbaline,” recorded by British psychedelic and progressive rock group Pink Floyd in 1969, portray nightmarish scenery in which the visual conventions of linear perspective are overturned. Referencing spatial compositions of figurative painting, one verse conveys disorientation and imminent danger through visual distortions of distances and dimensions:

The lines converging where you stand they must have moved the picture plain [sic] The leaves are heavy round your feet You hear the thunder of the train Suddenly it strikes you that they’re moving into range And Doctor Strange is always changing size.1

In this illogical scene ordered by a mobile picture plane, spatial recession is inverted such that the orthogonal lines of a perspectivally ordered space meet at the subject’s immobile, vulnerable body rather than at a distant vanishing point (or rather, the body occupies the vanishing point). The subject witnesses ongoing fluctuations in scale and paradoxical sensations of light objects perceived as weighty. This baffling view, in the words of the Jefferson Airplane, proclaims that “logic and proportion have fallen . . . dead.”2

Distortions, illogicalities, inversions, and alterations in the visible characteristics of a site, as expressed by the preceding lyrics, flourished in land artworks of the early 1970s by British

Columbian artist (Francis) Dean Ellis (b. 1948, Lasqueti Island, BC). Ellis’s works have received limited commentary by critics, curators, and scholars. Based on Hornby Island in the Strait of

1 Pink Floyd, “Cymbaline,” lyrics by Roger Waters, recorded 1969, on Music from the Film More, Capitol 50999 028938 22, 2011, compact disc.

2 Jefferson Airplane, “White Rabbit,” lyrics by Grace Slick, recorded 1966-1967, on Surrealistic Pillow, RCA Victor LPM/LSP-3766, February 1967, 33 1/3 rpm. 143

Georgia, he worked with land art, installation, photography, slide projections, video, and sound throughout the 1970s. In response to Ellis’s documentation of his understated, ephemeral in situ works of wood, plants, water, and stones, fellow BC artist Bill Jones hailed Ellis as “the first local [Vancouver-area] artist to develop a minimalist form of photographic practice.”3 In a recent essay, curator Grant Arnold named Ellis as one of numerous Vancouver conceptual artists who explored photography “as a model of acculturated perception” in the 1970s.4 As this chapter contends, however, Ellis’s sustained investigation of visual perception is inextricable from his sculptural, site-specific, land artworks through which he experimented with visual bewilderment, altered perceptual experiences of the outdoors, and a nearly hallucinatory viewing of West Coast settings. After a productive creative output throughout the 1970s, Ellis abandoned art-making.5

This chapter focuses on a sculptural work made from found stones and wood installed by

Ellis along a beach between 1970 and 1973. I argue that this work acts as a viewing device manipulating the visible spatial properties of sites—scale, depth, proximity, and form—to create temporary new sites with ambiguous, unstable appearances. Ellis’s sites reveal optical illusions and contradictory perspectives. These illogical, malleable views can be neither definitively located nor bounded. Filtered through his work, the site is a visual conundrum presenting multiple possible views and challenging one to distinguish perception from reality. This deceptive seeing of illusory views recalls that “scenery” and “scene,” as geographer Yi-fu Tuan noted, originated in the artificial trappings of theatre.6

3 Bill Jones, “Free Trade,” Arts Magazine 65 (February 1991): 39.

4 Arnold, “Reference/Cross Reference,” 92.

5 Scott Watson, “Urban Renewal: Ghost Traps, Collage, Condos and Squats – Vancouver Art in the Sixties,” in Intertidal: Vancouver Art and Artists (Vancouver: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, in association with the University of British Columbia; Antwerp: Antwerp Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005), 43.

144

For the ephemeral artwork examined in this chapter, Ellis intervened on an anonymous- looking, unidentified beach in British Columbia. This site was a flat, nondescript, rock-strewn shore with an expansive skyline. The artwork occupied a liminal site at the junction between land, water, and sky. Throughout his landscape oeuvre of the 1970s, the artist privileged shorelines, aqueous boundaries between the Canadian mainland and the Pacific Ocean: beaches, islets, inlets, coastal terrains, lakesides, and maritime scenery recur as the settings and subject matter for his land works and photographs. Ellis’s preference for publicly accessible, yet sparsely populated, areas, such as Hornby Island, determined the physical existence, accessibility, and medium of reception of the beach work to be discussed in this chapter. Locals and tourists had direct, though temporally limited, access to the work as its existence was restricted by the tide.

Most viewers beheld the work in photographs or slides projected in galleries.7

I present Ellis’s shoreline work as a “viewfinder” in distinction from the automobile- related “frames” of NETCo. As a practical apparatus, the viewfinder has multiple origins in technology, art, and tourism. “Viewfinder” originally referred to a supplementary attachment on a camera lens which facilitated photographing specific views.8 This term extends to practical

“perceptual aid[s]” used in drawing to organize a composition according to linear perspective.

Such a viewfinder encloses what is to be drawn “within a format.”9 The classic tourist viewfinder is a binocular, coin-operated, and in many versions, telescopic apparatus that not only formats a cropped view but also angularly orients the spectator to appreciate an aesthetic, postcard-like

6 Yi-fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 133.

7 Thus far, I have not found documentation to confirm either the precise dates of creation or duration for the work in question.

8 Oxford English Dictionary, 1989 ed., s.v. “view, n.”

9 Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: A Course in Enhancing Creativity and Artistic Confidence (Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, 1979), 104. 145 scene of a distant prospect or landmark. Ellis’s land artwork appropriates the functions of these antecedent devices in a site-specific construction made entirely from found pieces of wood and stone without lenses or other photographic equipment or machinery. This study of land art retains the essential definition of a viewfinder as a portable and manually installed geometric structure fully or partially delimiting scenery while also permitting the viewer to see what lies beyond the cropped area. Unlike the car window, the viewfinder directs attention to the spaces it both encloses and excludes. Also in contrast to the window, the viewfinder is autonomous from any larger structure and is thus akin to a multi-purpose, adaptable frame. Ellis made further refinements to the basic viewfinder design. Whereas conventional viewfinders assist in selecting and organizing visual content, Ellis’s land artwork introduces deliberate visual perplexity.

Although the land artwork discussed in this chapter retains a window-like function of opening onto a view, the artist’s placement of the work in, and near, water resulted in the viewfinder’s inclusion of rippling, distortive, reflective surfaces in lieu of the smooth, more mirror-like finish of a transparent glass pane. Ellis’s construction complicates the visual appearance of sites and the act of viewing. Rather than finding and fixing a view, the artist’s work displays sites that do not fit into recognized cultural or artistic categories.

This chapter contributes to the dissertation’s overarching argument—namely, that

Canadian land artists created viewing devices that undermined the stability of the concept of site—by focusing on Ellis’s derangement of the coherence and visual order of a site. The artist accomplished this strategy through a viewing device generating deliberately irresolvable visual and spatial paradoxes. This particular artwork and much of his output of the first half of the seventies manipulate visual perception to induce misperception. Expounding the central argument that the artist’s work operates as a viewfinder manifesting ambiguous, protean sites, 146 this chapter presents the following points. Firstly, I introduce and describe an early work by

Ellis, Perspective Construction for the Salish (1970-1973). Subsequently, I analyze how this upright viewfinder generates an illogical site through three visual strategies: the introduction of optical illusions manipulating distance, the creation of impossible spatial compositions, and the dismantling of conventions derived from linear perspective. I end by situating the viewfinder within the artist’s critique of Eurocentric visuality and his engagement with the local indigenous material culture of the British Columbian site in which he intervened, an area of historical tension between First Nations and Euro-Canadian communities. Notably, this chapter approaches the artist’s works as sculptural land artworks and therefore diverges from previous critics’ and curators’ readings of Ellis’s creations as subjects of conceptual, documentary photography.

Perceptual Tools

The motif of the upright viewfinder arises in Ellis’s Perspective Construction for the

Salish (1970-1973) built along an unidentified rocky shore in British Columbia, most likely his home, Hornby Island [figure 19]. At low tide, Ellis assembled this M-shaped, scaffold-like structure of long pieces of found, roughhewn wood balanced deftly on round boulders arranged in three squat piles in water filled with small stones amidst bare patches of earth. The vertical and diagonal beams divide a view of stones, water, and sky into three partially enclosed triangular zones. Behind the sculpture, an island of densely grouped rocks extends horizontally across the water. Perspective Construction is from a series of thirty-nine different in situ works of logs, plants, and stones entitled Landscape Morphology and Perceptual Tools (1970-1973).

Ellis experimented with the visual interplay amongst light, weather, and topography in works executed in locations across British Columbia including Hornby and other Georgia Strait islands, 147

Osoyoos, the Rocky Mountains, and Rainbow Lake near Whistler Mountain.10 He exhibited his creations alternately as thirty-five millimetre colour slide projections or large, wall-mounted photographs.11 On a poster announcing the exhibition of the Landscape Morphology series at the

Vancouver Art Gallery in 1972, the artist resumed his work as addressing “The landscape and a sense of region[,] how things work and move through the seasons[,] how our lives and needs are related to an area.”12 The year after the Vancouver exhibition, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design displayed this series,13 as did the Musée nationale d’art moderne in Paris during the

Canada Trajectoires 73 exhibit.14 As this chapter affirms, the Perspective Construction for the

Salish is one of the more formally and conceptually intricate works of the eclectic Perceptual

Tools as it integrates seeing, perspective, and site specificity with references to the historical relations between Euro-Canadians and the Coast Salish First Nations peoples of British

Columbia.

Illusory Views

Ellis selected an unobtrusive site—an open expanse of sky, water, and a deserted, nondescript patch of beach—devoid of significant landmarks save for a scattering of stones and logs. Amidst its surroundings, the viewfinder offers a seemingly straightforward partitioning of

10 Joan Lowndes, “Two Artists Respond to Power and Beauty,” Vancouver Sun, November 24, 1972. This article, as preserved in the Francis Dean Ellis File, Vancouver Art Gallery Library and Archives, lacks page numbers.

11 While Landscape Morphology and Perceptual Tools is often cited as being created from 1971 to 1972, certain slides are dated from as early as 1970 as listed in Dean Ellis (Victoria, BC: Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, 1976), 10. Ellis completed the series in 1973; see Young Contemporaries (London, ON: London Art Gallery, 1975), 17. Some images were shown as photographs on walls; see the black and white photograph of the Directions ’72 display in the Vancouver Art Gallery, 1972, Francis Dean Ellis File, Vancouver Art Gallery Library and Archives.

12 Landscape Morphology and Perceptual Tools exhibition poster from the Vancouver Art Gallery, 1972, Francis Dean Ellis File, Vancouver Art Gallery Library and Archives.

13 Young Contemporaries, 17. Grant Arnold specified that the Landscape Morphology series was shown at the famed Mezzanine of NSCAD in 1973. See Arnold, “Reference/ Cross Reference,” 94.

14 Sandra Shaul, “Canadian Art in Paris,” Art Magazine 15 (1973): 36. 148 the view beyond. A closer look through the latticework, however, reveals that this scene’s apparent anonymity masks a complex view replete with subtle, often contradictory, optical illusions orchestrated by Perspective Construction as a vertical viewfinder for an upright beholder frontal to the work. This section analyzes how, from this bodily position, a viewer becomes aware of manipulated illusions of the site’s visual appearance. Attending to the placement, materials, and structure of Ellis’s weighty work, I focus on the artist’s devising of illusions that perplex the perception of relative distances and spatial recession both within the work and vis à vis the body. The beach emerges as a realm of ambiguous and unstable forms, dimensions, and scale. Perspective Construction accentuates the contrasts between the viewer’s somatic and intellectual knowledge of the site versus the visual paradoxes engendered by the work.

In preparation for discussing Ellis’s thwarting of distance perception, I begin with the work’s presentation of a visual puzzle through its enigmatic appearance and purpose. Such a carefully equilibrated work appears out of place on land destined to be swept by the tide. Critic and art historian Dennis Wheeler singled out this work’s “ambiguity of function” in a 1973 article overviewing Ellis’s Landscape Morphology series.15 Although Wheeler did not expand upon this observation, the work conjures ample ideas. This assemblage simultaneously resembles the ramshackle ruins of a collapsed bridge, fence, or scaffold, the skeleton of a makeshift shelter, a pair of abandoned A-frames, a relic of the “driftwood city” built on a beach for the

“Experiments in Environment” workshop of 1966 (discussed in Chapter Two), or a fragment of a traditional Coast Salish wooden salmon trap known as a “weir.” Ellis’s work also uncannily recalls certain striking natural scenery on BC’s Queen Charlotte Islands. The staff of the

15 Dennis Wheeler, “Dean Ellis: Landscape Morphology and Perceptual Tools,” Artscanada 30 (February/March 1973): 26.

149

Vancouver Art Gallery received a postcard in 1973 from a colleague who facetiously wrote

“pieces by Dean Ellis” as an improvised caption for the card’s tourist photographs of Graham

Island’s precariously poised “Balance Rock” and log-littered Jungle Beach.16

The intriguing physical resemblance of Perspective Construction to robust architectural and geological forms raises the issue of the materiality of this sculptural land work. Ellis’s creation ostensibly invites discussion of the viewer’s sensorial experience of the materiality and tangibility inherent in the hefty, coarse branches and logs, as well as the smoothly eroded boulders. Viewing the work on location is also conjoined with feeling stone fragments crunching underfoot and atmospheric fluctuations. The relevance of materiality emerges most clearly in

Ellis’s careful, dexterous assembling of found materials and his focus on their strength, supporting capacity, and equilibrium. Yet, such weightiness is ironically underpinned by fragility as the work may be potentially collapsed by the imminent tide or manual force. This work attains longevity in documentation and the viewer’s memory. Despite Ellis’s undeniable emphasis on the material and tactile, further inspection of the work’s physical structure reveals that the non- material, intangible, and visual are of primordial significance to this creation.

This work functions as a viewfinder shaping one’s visual perception of the site. The zigzag shape frames, filters, and fences off a portion of the view beyond while directing the eyes toward details, such as the horizon or the three stones beneath the diagonal beams. Ellis commented in a 1972 interview that he preferred to call his works “perceptual tools” to convey their manipulation of light, shadow, perspective, distance, and tide levels.17 Wheeler reiterated

16 Ted (colleague of Vancouver Art Gallery staff), postcard to Gallery staff, May 22, 1973, Francis Dean Ellis File, Vancouver Art Gallery Library and Archives.

17 Lowndes, “Two Artists” (includes an interview with Dean Ellis), n.p. 150 the conception of the artwork as a functional tool by referring to the Construction as a “device”18 and the entire series as “filters” for viewing and interpreting the site.19

As a perceptual tool, the meshwork of the viewfinder weaves a web of visual contradictions and spatial quandaries based upon the complex interplay of the diagonal and vertical forms of the logs and rock piles with the horizontal expanses of sand, water, and sky.

Although viewers may be cognizant of the physical arrangement of both viewfinder and site, visual experience of the work engenders novel views overlaying the known site. Through its structure, placement, and materials, the work stirs optical uncertainty over the relative distances, positions, sizes, and shapes of objects, landforms, and water. One’s attention is first drawn to the central V-shaped structure comprised of two diagonal beams atop a heap of stones. Although ostensibly anchoring the work with a sense of solidity, the V-shape troubles the beholder’s interpretation of the relative positions of the objects and their amount of occupied space. At first glance, the two logs appear propped by distant stones. Consequently, the logs should appear to recede into space. However, instead of receding, the beams seem to enigmatically occupy the foreground. A contradictory site juxtaposing deep and shallow spaces thus emerges through an ambiguous structure that is both a pair of oblong, parallel shapes withdrawing to the horizon and a fully upright frame closer to the viewer.

Ellis’s viewfinder also reconfigures the site through subtler irresolvable spatial paradoxes pertaining to depth and scale. One vacillates between reading the three horizontal, slightly curved branches as slender sticks lying across the nearby diagonal V-beams or as giant logs scattered in the distance. Beneath these three beams, the central grouping of rocks presents another visual oddity. On one hand, this might be a vertical column of stacked stones resembling

18 Wheeler, “Dean Ellis,” 26.

19 Ibid., 24. 151 a child’s snowman. On the other, this could also be a horizontal row of stones lying in the water and receding into space. Furthermore, depending on one’s interpretation of the stones’ placement, they are either detached from, or conjoined to, the mass of far-off rocks parallel to the horizon. At the upper right of the work, an enormous hulking boulder appears simultaneously to perch surrealistically on nearby logs and to sit impassively on distant rocks. This array of rocks in the background is reminiscent of the small, rocky, log-strewn Miami Islet in the Georgia Strait upon which Robert Smithson had planned to construct a work of glass in 1969 [figure 20].

Watery reflections compound Ellis’s illusions. Details of the site are doubled in water and partially obstructed by patches of land uncovered at low tide. Shadowy reflections create the effect, as pointed out by Wheeler, of “extend[ing] the device into our own space.”20 Perspective

Construction invents a site which is not a continuous void containing discrete forms but is rather a discontinuous view replete with pockets of heterogeneous, contradictory spaces.

This illusory view problematizes the concept of “landscape morphology,” the first half of the title of Ellis’s series to which Construction belongs. Geographers define “landscape morphology” as the empirical, objective study of physical features on the earth’s surface, the relationships amongst the parts constituting a landscape, and the historical transformations of landscapes.21 Wheeler upheld morphological enquiry into the visual appearance of land forms as the thematic link amongst Ellis’s diverse “perceptual tools.” The critic wrote that “The

‘morphological’ approach [of Ellis] is essentially analytical, inasmuch as it is directed towards a specialized observation of materials and their relationships.”22 Wheeler’s observation is generally à propos with regard to the viewfinder work in which the viewer is invited to cast a

20 Ibid., 26.

21 Denis Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 16.

22 Wheeler, “Dean Ellis,” 23. 152 morphological gaze upon structural and spatial relationships amongst crisscrossing, overlapping forms on the surface of land and water. However, Ellis’s work contravenes the objectivity of morphological analysis. By presenting stones, logs, and branches that appear to occupy multiple locations simultaneously, the viewfinder introduces deliberate visual confusion perceived by a synthesizing gaze. This work proposes a subjective embrace of the vagaries of vision in contradistinction to what geographer Denis Cosgrove described as morphologists’ “rigorous exclusion of subjectivity” and their conception of “sites” as “static, determinate object[s] of scientific enquiry.”23

The morphologically ambiguous optical effects of Construction manifest the following strategies: the placement of the logs and stones creates the illusions of distanced forms being conflated or in physical contact, while objects located close to each other appear to be separated.

Consequently, relative locations and distances appear temporarily confounded when viewed through Ellis’s viewfinder. Depth and scale defy logic in an optically reconfigured, distorted view in which the near and the far intermix. The viewer’s eyes dart across a tapestry of layered and interwoven forms that appear to simultaneously contract and expand across a ground of indeterminate dimensions. This temporary visual reorganization of a nondescript site by a viewfinder marks an innovation in the artist’s treatment of distance in his Landscape

Morphology and Perceptual Tools series. The complexity and quantity of visual conundrums revealed through the viewfinder, as discussed previously, present a more sophisticated manipulation of depth perception than his other more minimal “perceptual tools.” These other works of stone, wood, and string economically devise unexpected optical illusions by manipulating the horizon line with a few simple linear forms. Rock Balance (circa 1970-1973) stages the illusion of distanced forms making physical contact. A diagonally balanced log

23 Cosgrove, Social Formation, 16. 153 propped on a boulder appears to support a smaller rock on its left end. This small stone is actually a large boulder closer to the horizon as seen by the viewer. The log is therefore a virtual, slanting bridge between the stones.24 Horizon Horizontal (circa 1970-1973) also plays with scale.

The work consists of two wooden stakes driven into grassy land. A long, low outline of presumably a far-off land mass hovers in the distance. In reality, this mass is a cord attached between the poles to align with the horizon when viewed from a particular spot on the ground.25

In adapting viewfinders and other visual markers to conjure illusory or impossible sites,

Ellis exemplified the fascination amongst artists of the 1970s with trompe l’oeil landscapes in which near and far converge at the horizon. For example, American-born, Toronto-based artist and writer Joe Bodolai (1948-2011) contributed a humourous photograph to Artscanada in 1974 in which he is portrayed as “‘touching up the landscape’ at Revelstoke, B.C.” [figure 21]. 26

Standing in the middle of a deserted residential street, he reaches out with a pen to deftly sketch imaginary adjustments on a distant, mist-laden mountain peak. That the artist stands slightly taller than the mountain accentuates the mock highhandedness of this “touching up” of a majestic landmark. While Ellis’s wood-and-stone Perspective Construction distorts distance to probe the deceptiveness and limitations of human sight, Bodolai’s sardonically fastidious gesture plays upon spatial composition to question the conception of art as an improvement upon nature.

Ellis’s and Bodolai’s illusory interventions in far-away scenery also recall Barbara and

Michael Leisgens’ photographic work Description of the Sun of 1975 [figure 22]. Barbara

Leisgen stands in a field and with one arm appears to maternally cradle the sun suspended above

24 Ellis’s Rock Balance is reminiscent of the “Balance Rock” on Graham Island, British Columbia.

25 For reproductions of these works, see Wheeler, “Dean Ellis,” 24. On the subject of horizons in the history of art, see Céline Flécheux, L’horizon: Des traités de perspective au land art (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2009).

26 Bodolai, “Borderlines,” 80. Bodolai later became a television scriptwriter and producer. 154 the horizon. While her feet are planted on the earth, her silhouette merges intimately with the sky: the glowing orb nestles against her torso, her head is level with a long cloud, and the horizon sweeps past her lower body. Her crooked arm functions as a viewfinder which manifests both the rift between humans and nature as well as a Utopian yearning for their reintegration.

Ellis’s viewfinder and the Leisgens’ performance employ similar ephemeral, non-intrusive strategies to reconfigure the layout and contents of sites. In the works of Ellis, Bodolai, and the

Leisgens, sites become elastic as disparate forms coalesce and spatial continuity is ruptured.

These three artworks consist of looking devices that do not perform functions analogous to those of conventional viewfinders used as practical aids and extensions or prostheses for the eye by photographers, art students, and tourists. Instead of clarifying sight and focusing on cropped imagery, the artists’ viewing devices complicate and confound views by manipulating distance and thus introducing optical illusions.

This visual puzzlement engendered by distorted depth perception is contingent upon the presumed presence of the body in relation to the viewfinder. In the three works by Ellis, Bodolai, and the Leisgens, the interaction between a viewfinder and a body (whether that of the artist or the viewer) facilitates the virtual collapsing of distance. By definition, a portable, re-installable viewfinder is intended for an embodied viewer on site. The artists’ viewfinders and similar devices depend upon the body’s presence, gestures, and proportions to produce optical illusions.

Bodolai wields a writing and drawing implement that functions as a “perceptual tool,” to borrow

Ellis’s term, which orients his eye toward, and extends his hand around, the mountain’s contours in the creation of a trompe l’oeil sketch upon a canvas of air. His manual circumscribing of the scenery is then bounded by the viewfinder of the camera documenting his performance. This visual illusion further relies upon the location of the artist: both Bodolai and the photographer 155 stand in the middle of a vacant street along the central traffic stripe that forms an axis aligning with the tip of the upheld pen. Barbara Leisgen uses her arm as a telescope-like viewfinder to devise a playful astronomical illusion to be witnessed by Michael Leisgen when he occupies the correct spot behind her in the field. His viewing position is then assumed by the viewer beholding the photograph in a gallery or book. Although the illusions of Ellis’s Perspective

Construction may also be appreciated by viewers examining his photographs, this work originally appealed to beholders, including the artist himself and passersby, present on the beach.

This weighty, manually assembled creation invited contemplation by upright, stationary viewers on a particularly angled spot on the shore. Were one to walk around the work or stand behind it, the illusions crafted by the artist would dissolve. When close by, the viewer would discover his or her reflection mingling with that of the work. The subject looking at Ellis’s documentation of the work also occupies a static, frontal position due to the two-dimensionality of the single still photograph that the artist took of this work. This specificity of bodily position and location required for viewing the carefully crafted optical illusions of Perspective Construction is consistent with that required by other previously discussed works of the Landscape Morphology and Perceptual Tools series, such as Rock Balance and Horizon Horizontal, in which the artist’s visual deceptions vanish upon beholders leaving their frontal viewing positions. Meanwhile, a morphological correlation also exists between the viewfinder and bodily positions. Upright logs and corpulent boulders suggest anthropomorphic forms sitting, stretching, or lying on the land and touching the horizon, akin to Bodolai’s tracing of a mountain’s contours and Leisgen’s encircling of the sun.

Ellis’s engineering of embodied, visual misperception of sites is further exposited when contrasted with other early 1970s site-specific artworks negotiating proximity and distance. A 156 notable contemporary account of such art is “Aligned with Nazca,” an article of 1975 by minimalist and earthworks artist Robert Morris. Morris (who did not discuss Ellis’s art) noticed the proliferation in the mid-seventies of small-scale “environmental” works, often executed outdoors, that explored the occupation and perception of sites by what he referred to as the

“physical” self or embodied subject.27 These environmental installations demarcate “spaces for the self—the self in relation to an enclosure and the expanse of the surrounding site.”28 As examples, his article includes images of works by Phil Simkin and Alice Aycock. Initially, the works enumerated by Morris appear to share general features of Ellis’s Perspective

Construction. The “environmental” works, although not viewfinders, do orient an embodied subject’s sight and steps across specific directions, sightlines, and trajectories in a plein-air setting. Also akin to Ellis’s work, the artworks referenced by Morris instill in beholders a continuous visual and kinesthetic awareness of their spatial relationships both to nearby, intimate, shelter-like zones and distant, external environs. Nevertheless, key features distinguish

Ellis’s conception of physically occupied sites from those discussed by Morris. In departure from

Morris’s depiction of the body as the intended occupant and focal point of an inner sanctuary

“for the self,” Ellis requires beholders to remain at a prescribed distance from his artwork to elicit optical illusions. Moreover, whereas Morris conceives of the viewer’s body as traversing stable, distinct layers of space arranged concentrically or sequentially, Ellis’s viewfinder presents stationary beholders with an ambiguous, protean web of sites characterized by uncertain thresholds between the body’s location on the beach, the viewfinder’s aqueous setting, and the panorama beyond. From the shore, viewers realize that the viewfinder does not strictly

27 Robert Morris, “Aligned with Nazca,” Artforum 14 (October 1975): 33.

28 Ibid., 35. 157 demarcate the site into relative proximity and distance, internal and external space, centre and periphery.

Ellis’s construction of the viewfinder’s paradoxical site as a function of bodily proximity finds amplification in Jeff Wall’s essay “About Making Landscapes” (1995). Wall argued that the existence of a landscape view depended upon the beholder’s “distant—but not too distant— viewing position.” Wall likened this intermediate “physical viewpoint” to “a moment of passage” and explained that the “viewing distance at which the picture-type ‘landscape’ crystallizes is an example of a threshold-phenomenon or a liminal state.”29 The wood-and-stone viewfinder offers a highly unpredictable visual threshold. On one hand, Ellis assembled the work to be viewed from a particular distance. On the other, the watery, rock-littered site does not freeze into a stable view but rather fractures and mirrors itself into a disjointed scene of myriad illusions and visual illogicalities. In this respect, Perspective Construction resonates with

Smithson’s Mirror Displacement series (1969). The viewer standing amidst the pebbles before

Ellis’s work occupies an indeterminate distance from a scene whose contents and forms seemingly occupy more than one position in relation to each other and to the body. Bodolai and the Leisgens also physically position the body at “a certain distance,”30 in Wall’s words, yet they locate the body at an unidentifiable, imaginary location both distal and proximal in relation to a form of sublime enormity. Of the works discussed, Perspective Construction represents the most complete dissolving of conventional scenery into an amorphous view.

The British Columbian viewfinder’s framing of water heightens the visual incoherence of the site. Reflections display an inversed, shadowy double of the site as sky and water overlap,

29 Jeff Wall, “About Making Landscapes,” in Jeff Wall (1995; repr., London: Phaidon Press, 1996), 144.

30 Ibid., 144.

158 stones multiply, and relative positions are confounded. The aqueous site both streams away from and flows toward the viewer. Shapes and outlines, the morphological details of the site, shift with every wave, splash, and breeze. Through its reflection, the viewfinder appears to stretch from an

M-shape into a squarish, rippling web. As conjoined yet incongruous halves, the solid and the reflected viewfinders suggest complementary perceptual tools. Whereas the stone-and-wood device acts as a screen, gate, and frame reordering the view beyond, its liquid counterpart evokes a cast net. The reflection denies a clear, stable view, thus making uncertainty a condition of beholding the site.

Ellis’s inclusion of water as a medium of visual distortion forms part of his wider exploration into the blurred sight and drifting viewpoint afforded by boat travel. The artist would later refer to this nautical aesthetic in his oeuvre as a “damp lyricism.”31 Throughout the seventies, he set out by boat to explore the islands in the Strait of Georgia and further north along the Pacific coast. Shorelines, islands, waterways, and vessels recur in his land works, sculptures, and photographs of the era. Unlike the all-seeing, conquering “canoeman” invoked by Frye as the quintessential, masterful viewer of Canadian landscape (discussed in Chapter One), Ellis drew upon his nautical experiences of weather-induced poor visibility. Building upon the optical illusions in the reflection of Construction, the artist’s boat-themed works allude to losing one’s bearings while aimlessly adrift in mist, cloud, and fog. Ellis penned a stream-of-consciousness ship’s log recounting this experience for Sketch for My First Boat (1975), a work including drawings, 160 colour slides of Hornby Island, and a cedar sculpture of a vessel shaped like a fish skeleton and a Viking boat. Imbued with atmospheric details, his text conveys perceptual confusion as indistinct colours, forms, and sounds mingle and vanish in a haze. “Four hours off

31 Dean Ellis to Chris Varley, March 3, 1976, in Coasts, the Sea, and Canadian Art (Stratford, ON: The Gallery/Stratford, 1978), n.p. 159

Cape Caution . . . ,” he wrote, “everything is grey blurry blue with occasional tinges of grey green land fading to grey ocean. The wave curves up close are similar to the curves of the islands protruding through the distant horizontal, voices on the radio are overlapping a song. . . .” His narrative protracts this thematic sensorial overlapping and inter-transforming of shapes as he next describes the unexpected emergence through the fog of an uprooted tree in the water which blocks the path of his boat: the tree assumes the form of “boat ribs” and then of a saw.32 Ellis concisely concludes his text with a fantasy of “disappear[ing] into the fog.”33 Both the illusory views generated by the shoreline viewfinder and the artist’s narrative of diaphanous, mirage-like scenery perceived while afloat on a vessel punctuate the deceptiveness and uncertainty of sight central to Ellis’s work. The nautical narrative elaborates the stone-and-wood viewfinder’s manipulation of distance perception and its distorted duplication of forms in watery reflections.

This diary further destabilizes sight and site by underscoring the indistinct outlines and indeterminate locations of shape-shifting forms beheld by a floating viewer. Thus, Perspective

Construction and the boat function as perceptual tools inciting the viewing of enigmatically protean and subtly hallucinatory sites.

Paradoxical Planes

Ellis’s perceptual experiments prompt further inquiry into the interactions between visual details and the overall spatial organization of the illusory site created by the Perspective

Construction viewfinder. This section addresses the viewfinder’s generation of a site that challenges conventional Western pictorial landscape compositions characteristically ordered into receding spatial planes or grounds—a fore-, middle-, and background—as epitomized by many

32 Ellis, Dean Ellis, 3.

33 Ibid., 5.

160 landscape paintings, postcards, and commercial landscape photography. The optical illusions of

Perspective Construction manipulate the basic compositional elements of a conventional landscape painting or postcard scene—horizontal stretches of earth or water and sky divided by the horizon. Traversing these expanses and the aforementioned triad of spatial “grounds,” the vertical and diagonal lines formed by logs and stones simultaneously suggest and thwart spatial recession, another key feature of much landscape imagery. The artist’s dismantling of pictorial tradition is encapsulated by the resemblance of the logs and branches to a dilapidated picture frame or smashed easel left to the elements. Moreover, Ellis conceived of spatial “composition” as both a perceptual and cultural issue. Therefore, this section emphasizes that the viewfinder’s subversion of the spatial schemas of pictorial landscapes also questions related cultural attitudes.

Ellis detailed the origins of his critical response to pictorial scenery compositions in an interview from about 1974, a year after the completion of the Landscape Morphology and

Perceptual Tools series. He was initiated into landscape photography when commissioned by a

Vancouver hiking club to provide illustrations of scenery and nature trails for a book. Ellis, educated in art history at the University of British Columbia, grew dissatisfied with what he described as the “idealized,” “boring” landscape imagery expected by his employers.34 His rejection of touristic landscape imagery highlights the irony of the quip “pieces by Dean Ellis” jotted on the aforementioned 1973 postcard depicting scenic views of British Columbia.

However, the postcard-sender’s implied comparison between Ellis’s works and the surreal, seemingly gravity-defying landforms of the Queen Charlotte Islands also aptly acknowledges the artist’s resistance toward stock landscape motifs. Following the trail guide commission, he consequently decided to embark on an artistic career devoted to subverting established visual

34 Dean Ellis, “Dean Ellis: ‘Grounds’ 160 Slides of Landscape,” interview by Darcy Edgar, circa 1974, transcript for the B.C. Sculptors exhibition, Francis Dean Ellis Artist File, Vancouver Art Gallery Library and Archives.

161 codes of landscape art.35 Ellis’s refutation of convention found nourishment in the anti- establishment ethic cultivated by the west coast art scene. While working on the Landscape

Morphology series, he dwelled in 1972 amongst people he referred to as “living on the land” on

Hornby Island,36 a gulf island of thirty square kilometres noted for its sandy beaches, woods, cliffs, ancient native petroglyphs, and the province’s largest grove of ancient Garry oak trees.

The artistic community based in and around Vancouver, the gulf islands, Victoria, and the squatters’ dwellings in the intertidal mud flats, had gained national recognition for its anti- capitalist, communal lifestyles in the late sixties.37

Through the Construction, Ellis honed his approach to questioning inherited ways of viewing and interpreting outdoor sites. In the artist’s words, he was especially concerned with critiquing the compositional “tradition” still evident in commercial landscape photography of the

1970s according to which a site is divided into adjacent, receding spatial planes or “grounds,” namely a distinguishable foreground, middle ground, and background.38 The artist also conceived of these grounds as “layers that fade or vanish towards the horizon.”39 Ellis correlated this spatial order with 18th-century picturesque landscape art, a Western European “standard” which he appropriated as a set of “rules” with which “to play” inventively.40

35 No documentation confirms that Ellis was credited with supplying photographs for a hiking book.

36 Lowndes, “Two Artists” (includes an interview with Dean Ellis), n.p.

37 On the alternative lifestyles of BC artists of this era, see Gary Lee-Nova, “Our Beautiful West Coast Thing” and John Buckley, “Keeping it Together in Vancouver: The Search for Alternatives,” both featured in Artscanada 28 (June/July 1971): 22-37; 38-43. On the late sixties and early seventies art scene in Vancouver and the mud flats, see Watson, “Urban Renewal,” 30-49. Watson briefly mentions Ellis (ibid., 41-43).

38 Ellis, “‘Grounds,’” n.p.

39 Ellis, Dean Ellis, 8.

40 Ellis, “‘Grounds,’” n.p.

162

Before elaborating on Ellis’s rupturing of picturesque visual space in his wood-and-stone viewfinder, the triad of spatial “grounds” invoked by the artist requires additional specification in connection with its impact on eye movements and distance perception. Grounds are not unique to

18th-century British landscape art. Moreover, “picturesque” has encompassed multiple definitions throughout history.41 However, Ellis’s insistence upon the picturesqueness of grounds may be attributed to the fact that many picturesque paintings and garden designs exemplify a spatial schema leading the viewer’s eyes from foreground to background across a gradual, winding trajectory, often a serpentine body of water or a sinuous path. In his analysis of eye movements elicited by garden designs, architectural scholar Marc Treib singled out the snaking path of the elaborate English garden of Stourhead, Wiltshire, designed and created by Henry Hoare the younger from 1741 to 1772. This path guides the viewer to behold a carefully ordered program of plantings, vistas, and architectural features, the latter dubbed “eye catchers” in the 18th century.42 In his key book, The Visual Elements of Landscape, geographer John A. Jakle emphasized that classical 17th-century French landscape paintings employ similar compositional features to “conduct the eye smoothly and rhythmically to the background” across receding planes.43 He pointed to works by Claude Lorrain in which varying shades of colour, figures, and objects pull the eyes backward, a movement further encouraged by dark coulisses at the sides of

41On the diverse uses of the term “picturesque” and its relationship to contemporary art, see the following: Yve- Alain Bois, “A Picturesque Stroll around Clara-Clara,” in Richard Serra, ed. Ernst-Gerhard Güse (New York: Rizzoli, 1987), 40-59; Johanne Lamoureux, “Places and Common-places of the Picturesque,” in Sightlines: Reading Contemporary Canadian Art, trans. Donald McGrath, eds. Jessica Bradley and Lesley Johnstone (Montreal: Artextes Editions, 1994), 284-309.

42 Marc Treib, “Moving the Eye,” in Sites Unseen: Landscape and Vision, ed. Dianne Harris and D. Fairchild Ruggles (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 71-72.

43 John A. Jakle, The Visual Elements of Landscape (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 122. 163 his paintings [figure 23]. Nicolas Poussin frequently included diagonal paths in his works to guide the viewer toward the sky.44

To thwart such classic spatial compositions, Ellis painstakingly positioned the logs and stones of Perspective Construction to arrange an un-picturesque, that is, an “ungrounded,” view.

The viewfinder’s manipulation of depth, scale, and positions, as previously discussed, weaves a curious view not ordered into visually distinct, consistent spatial planes. Such a view frustrates leisurely, unidirectional ocular perusal from foreground to horizon. Rather, the work entices the eyes across multidirectional starts, sweeps, and stops. Although the diagonal wooden beams initially suggest a sense of spatial recession and the upright logs evoke coulisse-like elements, the structure’s apparent flatness prevents the eyes from penetrating this scene. The work is as much a series of semi-enclosed openings as it is a barrier. While details of the sculpture draw visual attention toward the horizon, the watery reflection lures the eyes forward. As viewers notice inconsistencies in the appearance of the site filtered and fractured by the work, their eyes oscillate across visual paradoxes in the disposition of stones in water. At the outer limits of the site, only the horizon line and the oblong rocky mass behind the work preserve a tenuous hint of distinct spatial grounds. Such visual effects are accentuated when contrasted with the expanded surroundings not filtered through the viewfinder. Ellis has constructed a view governed by an innovative nonsequential, non-planar, compositional logic. Perspective Construction diverges from the “ground”-defined visual codes of European landscape painting and the touristic postcard scenery of the hiking guide photographs. As a vehicle for what the artist referred to as a

“play” upon the visual and spatial conventions of landscape representations, the viewfinder opens onto a site of planned optical disorder.

44 Ibid., 121-122. 164

Perspective Construction’s counter-picturesqueness overturns critic Sidney Tillim’s noted correlation of earthworks and outdoor art with the picturesque. In a 1968 article in

Artforum, Tillim categorized earthworks as an excessively refined, banal, “20th-century version of the picturesque.” Citing earthworks’ derivative logic as the source of this picturesque revival, the critic argued that such art refashioned nature in accordance with forms and compositions of earlier abstract art and pop art.45 The roughly geometric forms of Ellis’s work do invite comparisons with modernist abstract sculpture. Wheeler likened Perspective Construction to the works of American sculptor Mark Di Suvero.46 However, this slight resemblance does not account for Ellis’s reworking of historical landscape traditions. Through this work, Ellis unveiled one variant of the picturesque as a set of visual “patterns” based on what he interpreted as a

“conditioned perspective and distance perception”47 requiring further scrutiny in response to its lingering, often unquestioned, presence in photography, film, and recreational activities.

The ambiguously organized shoreline sans evident spatial grounds as constructed by the viewfinder was refined by Ellis in Grounds (1974), a series of 160 photographic slides of British

Columbian scenery. The earlier illusory sites of Perspective Construction and other works of the

Landscape Morphology and Perceptual Tools series (1970-1973) transmuted into even more visually challenging spatial compositions in Grounds. Whereas the earlier series displays visual conundrums and optical trickery through sculptural, in situ viewing contraptions, the later series exemplifies Ellis’s adoption of the camera’s viewfinder to capture material for what he envisioned as “imaginary” or “dream landscape[s].” 48 These images continue his rupturing of

45 Sidney Tillim, “Earthworks and the New Picturesque,” Artforum 7 (December 1968): 43.

46 Wheeler, “Dean Ellis,” 26.

47 Ellis, Dean Ellis, 8.

48 Ellis, “‘Grounds,’” n.p. 165 conventional compositions divided into adjacent grounds. In a typical example [figure 24], the slide appears to straightforwardly depict a seamless, continuous view. However, Grounds actually consists of composite photographs that juxtapose, in the manner of a collage, fragmented landforms and spatial planes extracted from different images. This particular photograph features layered horizontal segments from two or three separate photographs. The bottom third of the slide depicts grassy terrain receding toward a cloud-covered mountain range across the middle third of the image. Above, the sky blurs smoothly into a body of water bordered by mountainous land with patches of conifers. While the lower and middle grounds are seen as if by a viewer standing on land, the upper stretch opens onto a bird’s-eye panorama.

Discontinuous grounds and viewpoints undermine the illusion of compositional continuity.

Ellis’s incompatible views meet in a hybrid, hallucinatory west coast as a logical extension of the intermingling spatial planes in Perspective Construction.

Ellis’s push toward increasingly fantastic, contradictory views resonates with the unreal scenery of the tripartite roadside recordings proposed by Jeff Wall in his Landscape Manual

(1969), a book of black and white photographs and text. Wall’s ideas suggest a convergence between Ellis’s work and NETCo’s roadside views. Wall imagined using three movie or still cameras, each aimed out of a window of a different moving vehicle, to record suburban roadside views of Vancouver. Such images would be shown as intricately edited films or colour slides projected simultaneously in a staggered order and in reverse. These recordings and exhibition techniques would display delirious imagery fragmented across time and space, resulting in an

“interpenetration of all landscape,” while “emphasizing [the] impossibility of making workable landscape distinctions.” Wall devised the pun “unreel” to capture the confusing overlap of

166 reality, representation, and fiction. 49 This triptych of cinematic window views and Ellis’s in situ viewfinder plunge beholders into visual disorientation.

Above all, Ellis’s affinity with Wall’s landscape displays underlines the former’s innovative adaptations of exhibition technologies to devise amorphous, illusory sites without ground-based compositions. He usually showed his ephemeral landscape interventions, including the Landscape Morphology series and Grounds, as projections of thirty-five millimetre colour slides in galleries. During these exhibitions, Ellis surpassed Wall’s imagined “tri-ocular recording device”50 by transforming the slide projector into what he dubbed “a landscape machine.”51 Hence, the projector functions as a mechanical viewfinder in conjunction with ancillary perceptual tools in Ellis’s work of the early 1970s including the Perspective

Construction viewfinder, the camera, and the drifting boat in addition to other means conducive to visual distortion, such as watery reflections, fog, and photographic montage. Complementing his use of previously discussed viewing strategies, Ellis creatively employed slide projectors to construct illusory, often ethereal and vapourous views unhampered by clearly defined borders or spatial planes. Forms within these luminous projections lack clear outlines and appear to multiply and overlap. Hence, the landscape machine’s distinctive visual, cinematic, and atmospheric effects enhance the paradoxical perceptions of the viewfinder land artwork. Ellis experimented with visual effects and ambiances through carefully orchestrated, rhythmic projections. He privileged fading techniques to create blurred, mesmerizing waves of dream-like

49 Jeff Wall, Landscape Manual (Vancouver: Fine Arts Gallery, University of British Columbia, 1969, 1970), 38.

50 Ibid., 38.

51 Maureen Ryan, “Dean Ellis, Merv Hutchinson, Robert Kleyn [,] Three Young B.C. Artists Working With Slides [,] U.B.C. Fine Arts Gallery, October 17 through November 6 [1974]” (includes an interview with Dean Ellis), press release issued by the Fine Arts Gallery, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, n.p., 1974, Francis Dean Ellis File, Vancouver Art Gallery Library and Archives.

167 or spectral sites, as in the exhibition at the UBC Fine Arts Gallery of Landscape as Metaphor:

Forest Openings as Vagina[s] (1974), a series of photographs of glens in BC intended by the artist as an “homage to Emily Carr.”52 Maureen Ryan of the UBC Fine Arts Gallery described the slides as “governed by a fade in-out device; the transition from one slide to another is visually captivating in itself.” At the same exhibit, Grounds achieved different visual effects “by the syncopated projection” of successively overlapping and fading views randomly selected beforehand.53 Atmospheric visuals also permeated the exhibition of Sketch for My First Boat at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 1976 during which six-foot slide projections of what critic Joan

Lowndes described as the “moody seascapes” of Hornby Island provided an otherworldly backdrop for a “wraith”-like vessel of branches and logs.54

Initiated by Perspective Construction, this exploration of views increasingly untethered by conventional compositions and recession reached its zenith in the slide projection of Passages

(1976). From this series of 160 slides of superimposed British Columbian landscapes, coastlines, and seascapes, emerged a fuller visual disorientation. The display of Passages featured an ongoing stream of scenery glimpsed through veils of mist and spume. This series further elaborated the artist’s disavowal of distinguishable spatial grounds, locations, and borders as he displayed this work using a slide projector in combination with a “dissolve fader unit.” In a letter of 1976, Ellis explained that experiences of visual bewilderment inspired the content and projection technique of Passages. In the artist’s words, the series aimed to present:

the coastal landscape in such a way as to accentuate certain properties—the fading, layering, tonal [,] and hazy nature of the inside passages. The layering and fading is [sic] related to passage [-] finding problems, or the ambiguity when trying to determine one’s

52 Ryan, “Dean Ellis,” (includes an interview with Dean Ellis), n.p.

53 Ibid., n.p.

54 Joan Lowndes, “Western Triptych,” Artscanada 33 (December 1976/January 1977): 48. 168

position. The dissolve fader unit becomes the fog equivalent as the slide densities, when dissolved into overlaps, become foggy—or [the] in-between stage where the coast becomes the undulating amorphous shades of grey green blue.55

In eschewing established ground-based spatial compositions in his land works and display techniques, Ellis presented sites as fluid views, airy scenes, and vapourous mirages.

Perspectival Traps

By reworking planar compositions through the illusory sites of the viewfinder and other

“landscape machines,” the artist also subverted spatial models based on linear perspective as indicated by the title of his land artwork. Ellis’s critique of what he categorized as sites ordered into “picturesque grounds” dovetails into his response to Western traditions of representational compositions based on linear perspective in which forms recede toward a vanishing point. Ellis’s

Perspective Construction literally deconstructs perspective by reordering the beach into a taut patchwork of contradictory optical illusions. I now examine how Ellis, by dissolving the vestiges of visual order, contested linear perspective as a spatial model and as a historical European phenomenon of debated significance in the art and visual culture of the late 1960s and 1970s.

Prior to the current scholarly acknowledgement of the critiques, and even repudiations, of linear perspective by 20th-century artists, perspective inspired lively, prolific, trans-disciplinary debates amongst artists and academics in the era under discussion. As examined later in this section, Ellis’s work has an affinity with imaginative plays on perspective in outdoor settings by

Richard Long and Jan Dibbets. Academic debates amongst art historians, anthropologists, psychologists, and geometers yielded methodologically diverse arguments about the history, theory, application, and continued relevance of linear as well as curvilinear perspective and the psychology of perception. As extensively documented by art historian Marisa Dalai Emiliani, scholarly discussion about classical, medieval, and Renaissance perspective in the West

55 Ellis to Varley, March 3, 1976, n.p. 169 proliferated throughout the sixties, 56 an interest which continued into the subsequent decade in numerous publications including McLuhan and Parker’s Through the Vanishing Point (1968),

Samuel Y. Edgerton’s The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (1975), and new editions or translations of older texts, such as John White’s The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial

Space (1967) and Erwin Panofsky’s seminal Perspective as Symbolic Form (1975).57

The absurd view woven by Ellis’s Perspective Construction reworks the generalized model of linear perspective often associated with Renaissance art. Both his viewfinder work and a painting organized according to the perspectival schema of Alberti are ideally viewed by a beholder at a particular position and distance. However, this stipulation for viewing produces differing effects. Whereas the ideal viewer of the painting is a disembodied, monocular eye observing the illusion of a plausible, ordered, three-dimensional space represented on a flat surface, the viewfinder guides an embodied beholder to gaze upon purely optical deformations and contradictions in a three-dimensional setting. By simultaneously sundering and melding different planes of space while distorting the scale and shape of objects, Ellis’s work contravenes the expectation of coherent spatial relationships and consistent relative dimensions amongst perspectivally ordered forms. In shedding the paradigm of perspective epitomized by Italian

Renaissance art, Ellis’s partially fictive site retrieves an archaic concept of “perspective” from

16th- and 17th-century England. In this context, “perspective” referred to a curiosity designed to

56 Marisa Dalai Emiliani, “La question de la perspective—1960-1968,” in Architecture et perspective chez Brunelleschi et Alberti, trans. Jean-Jacques Le Quillenc (Paris: Verdier, 2004), 71-90.

57 See Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1975); John White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space, 2nd ed. (London: Faber, 1967). Panofsky’s text of 1927 was translated from the original German into French in 1975 as La perspective comme forme symbolique et autres essais, trans. Guy Ballangé (Paris: Minuit, 1975). 170 captivate beholders with its unusual visual effects, such as a mirror or lens crafted to produce distortions or illusions, as well as anamorphic images.58

The stone-and-wood viewfinder is also a subversive appropriation of the form and function of early modern mechanical aids known as “perspective devices.” Artists unversed in the mathematical training required of linear perspective used apparatuses, often in the form of frames, to guide and correct their representations of foreshortened bodies and receding landscapes. Ellis’s fence-like, wooden contraption is an absurdist, outlandish subspecies of the upright Renaissance frame, equipped with an ordered grid of strings, familiar to Leonardo,

Alberti, and Bramantino. Albrecht Dürer illustrated this practical device in a well-known print of

1525. A seated draughtsman sketches a female nude reclining on the other side of the frame

[figure 25]. A pointed stylus called a “sight” anchors the artist’s gaze as he reproduces the contents of the grill, called a graticola by Alberti, onto a paper divided into small squares of the same quantity and relative proportions as those in the frame [figure 26]. Dürer also described an alternative apparatus consisting of an upright, transparent glass plate onto which one traced the contours of a subject visible on the other side before copying that outline on paper.59 An illustration of an adjustable “perspective machine” appears in Le due regole della prospettiva pratica of 1583 by architect and theorist Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola [figure 27]. This engraving portrays a draughtsman drawing on a gridded paper as an assistant scrutinizes a model through a peephole attached to a contraption equipped with a hand crank-operated upright beam on a four- legged base.60 Vincent van Gogh, in a letter to his brother Theo in August 1882, sketched a

58 Oxford English Dictionary, 2010 ed., s.v. “perspective.”

59 Dürer described and illustrated four perspective devices in the revised 1538 edition of Underweysung der Messung mit dem Zirckel un Richtscheyt, first published in 1525. On the graticola and its depiction by Dürer, see Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, 4th ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955), 252- 253.

171 simple “perspective frame” of wood and iron with adjustable strings which he used while teaching himself to paint landscapes [figure 28].61 The artist explained that “one can look through it as through a window” with the intersecting lines establishing “a few basic markers, with the help of which one can make a firm drawing . . . .”62 Remnants of the graticola and van

Gogh’s grid linger in the wooden latticework of Ellis’s Perspective Construction. Yet the general function of Ellis’s “perceptual tools” also derives from other early modern perspective devices.

Daniel Hartnack published a manual on such instruments, Perspectiva Mechanica (1683), which included complex diagrams of a frameless device while other artists of the same era made use of the camera obscura.63 Painter and art theorist Gérard de Lairesse, in Het Groot Schilderboek

(The Great Book of Painters) of 1707, advised artists unfamiliar with the rules of perspective to base their drawings of urban and rural views on reflections on “a convex looking glass of about a foot diameter (to be bought at the Nuremberg toy-shops),”64 while amateur British landscape artists of the 18th century sought the assistance of the Claude glass.

This plethora of early modern and modern perspective devices—frames, grids, lenses, and mirrors—constitute precursors to the practical viewfinders used by photographers, tourists, and drawing students as discussed at the opening of this chapter. Both the historical perspective

60 This illustration originally appeared in Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola, Le due regole della prospettiva pratica . . . con i comentarij del R.P.M. Egnatio Danti, ed. Ignazio Danti (Rome: 1583). This image is analyzed in David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (London: Phaidon, 2003), 561-562.

61 Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, August 1882, in The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, ed. Mark Roskill (London: Flamingo, 1983), 162.

62 Ibid., 162-163.

63 Daniel Hartnack [Hartnaccius, pseud.], Perspectiva Mechanica . . . . (Lüneburg: Kelpen, 1683), http://digital.slub-dresden.de/id265228751.

64 Gérard de Lairesse, A Treatise on the Art of Painting in All its Branches. . . . trans. William Marshall Craig (1707; repr., London: E. Orme, 1817), 107. Citation refers to the 1817 edition. Originally published as Het Groot Schilderboek (1707).

172 devices and the later viewfinders provide clearly circumscribed views of the visible world.

However, a significant difference exists between the European perspective devices and Ellis’s

Perspective Construction. While the earlier apparatuses guide artists to create two-dimensional, approximate representations of visual distortions common to daily phenomenological experience, such as slanting building façades or sharply foreshortened bodies, Ellis’s deceptive viewfinder generates novel visual effects incompatible with the viewer’s commonsense knowledge of the shapes and dispositions of landforms and water.

Ellis’s viewfinder stems from his convincement, shared by certain scholars active in the early 1970s, that linear perspective had oversaturated popular culture. Although perspectival compositions figured in the cultural production of previous decades, the late 1960s and early

1970s marked a crisis point in which artists and scholars questioned the pervasiveness of linear perspective in the postmodern era. As discussed earlier, Ellis correlated his critique of spatial recession with his rejection of pictorially organized landscape views abundant in commercial landscape photography as well as in the tourist, leisure, and recreational industries. In emphasizing the omnipresence of linear perspective, Ellis concurred with French geometers

André Barre and Albert Flocon. In their 1968 manual on curvilinear perspective written for artists, the co-authors noted the persistence of linear perspective in the documentary photography of “today.”65 Some twenty years later, art historian Hubert Damisch similarly commented in

L’origine de la perspective, first published in 1987, that the perspectival paradigm had attained an unprecedented visibility in “our era” thanks to photography, video, and cinema.66 As suggested by the title of Ellis’s viewfinder, the artist saw perspective as a highly topical issue of

65 André Barre and Albert Flocon, La perspective curviligne: de l’espace visuel à l’image construite (Paris: Flammarion, 1968), 17.

66 Hubert Damisch, L’origine de la perspective, rev. ed. (1987; repr., Paris: Flammarion, 1993), 49. 173 dubiously assumed normalcy. His objection to the banality of mainstream landscape compositions echoed art historian Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr. who, in 1975, conceded that “Today we are the tired children of their [Brunelleschi’s and Alberti’s] discovery; the magic of perspective illusion is gone, and the ‘innate’ geometry in our eyes and in our paintings is taken for granted.”67

By jolting this complacency toward perspectival overload, Ellis’s ironically titled viewfinder heeded anthropologist Edward T. Hall’s call in an essay of 1970 to overthrow

“closed-score” vision. Hall borrowed the term “closed-score” from landscape architect Lawrence

Halprin, discussed in Chapter Two, to designate historically specific forms of “visual stereotyping” manifest in art, culture, and humans’ relationships to spaces and the natural environment. For Hall, the regurgitation of linear perspective in conventional art was the quintessential example of conformity to popular demand for the comfortably familiar.68 The anthropologist argued that artists and scientists could initiate the disintegration of closed-score vision by first exposing exhausted conventions. Visual stereotypes would then hopefully give way to “open-score” or multisensory spatial experience nurturing a progressive ecological consciousness and greater synergy between humans and their surroundings.69 Ellis’s unraveling of perspective through the viewfinder aligns with Hall’s aversion toward closed-score vision.

However, the artist did not accord with Hall’s dismissal of sight as a restrictive, overhyped mode of spatial experience. Ellis confronted the limitations imposed upon sight by artistic conventions and explored new visual avenues for complicating the seemingly simple act of beholding a view.

67 Edgerton, Renaissance Rediscovery, 4.

68 Edward T. Hall, “Art, Space, and the Human Experience” (1970), in Arts of the Environment, ed. Gyorgy Kepes (New York: George Braziller, 1972), 53.

69 Ibid., 57-59. 174

Perspective Construction betrays a visually oriented open-score strategy akin to works of the late 1960s by Richard Long and Jan Dibbets. Long’s England 1967 (1967) understatedly skews an essential feature of perspective: the foreshortening of receding forms [figure 29]. An upright, black, unadorned rectangle acts as a viewfinder planted in a grassy park. Substituting for the frame of a landscape painting, the thin edges of the rectangle cut around part of the lawn in the foreground, dense trees in the middle ground, and more grass beyond. Long’s frame draws the beholder’s line of sight upward toward a distant copse where the eyes land upon a white elliptical outline. The viewer familiar with perspective reads the oval as a slightly foreshortened circle. Yet, as art historian Colette Garraud observed, the circle is somewhat less flattened than expected. The artist achieved this subtly anti-perspectival effect by placing the circle on a hill.70

This circle is akin to an elevated eye winkingly returning the gaze of the beholder. Long and

Ellis distort the distortions of classic linear perspective to concoct their own idiosyncratic spatial logic.

Ingenuous spatial warping occurs more dramatically in the Perspective Corrections series of the late 1960s by Dibbets, who avowed to the Vancouver art critic Charlotte Townsend that

“The visual is the most important sense for me.”71 The artist contributed a representative example of a Correction to a deliberately unnamed exhibition at Simon Fraser University in the summer of 1969. Iain Baxter, then a University faculty member, obtained a postcard bearing a photograph of the work executed on campus [figure 30]. Dibbets sent orders that a carefully

70 Garraud, L’idée de nature dans l’art contemporain, 64. On Long, also see Nicholas Alfrey and Joy Sleeman, “Framing the Outdoors: Landscape and Land Art in Britain, 1973-1977,” Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes 29:1 (2009): 83-94.

71 Jan Dibbets, “Jan Dibbets in Conversation with Charlotte Townsend,” interview by Charlotte Townsend, Artscanada 28 (August/September 1971): 50.

175 designed trapezoid be cut from the lawn and photographed from a designated angle.72 This bare patch of earth surprisingly resembles an upright, unforeshortened square. The resulting image reverses the conventions of single-point perspective whereby parallel lines, or orthogonals, converge at a vanishing point such that a square on the ground ordinarily resembles a trapezoid.

Dibbets achieved the opposite effect by “correcting” perspectival distortion with a mathematically calculated warping. The works of Ellis, Long, and Dibbets manifest the renewed significance, perceived in the late sixties and early seventies, of relinquishing or loosening the conventions of linear perspective in site-specific art. Their works represent a new chapter in what

Rosalind Krauss described as the “insistent voiding of perspective” in landscape art after 1860.73

Ellis’s overturning of perceptual habits derived from his desire to redraft prevalent attitudes towards sight and sites. The title of his land work is a punning reminder of the extended definition of “perspective” as a personal stance, outlook, or point of view. In phrasing seemingly drawn from environmental perception studies of the late sixties and early seventies previously discussed in relation to NETCo, Ellis explained his work as exposing and revising “attitudes toward the landscape,”74 or a “perceptual attitude,”75 characterized by Western viewers being

“culturally conditioned to view the landscape in certain ways.”76 In his interviews and writings of the early 1970s, “attitude” encompasses viewers’ behaviours toward, and ideas about, sites as manifested in viewing habits, tastes in scenery represented and lived, in addition to qualitative

72 Charlotte Townsend, “Feelsense Nonsense Idealart,” Vancouver Sun, May 30, 1969, 10A.

73 Rosalind Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View,” Art Journal 42:4 (Winter 1982): 312. Whereas Ellis and Dibbets manipulate the viewer’s perception of depth, the painters examined by Krauss emphasize the flat, lateral surfaces of the canvas and the wall.

74 Ellis, “‘Grounds,’” n.p.

75 Ellis, Dean Ellis, 8.

76 Ryan, “Dean Ellis,” (includes an interview with Dean Ellis), n.p. 176 judgments of how a view accords with beholders’ expectations. Landscape attitudes, as defined by Ellis, are historically and culturally specific and shaped by aesthetic ideals from art and mass culture. The artist’s thought intersects with Yi-fu Tuan’s ideas in Topophilia (1974). Tuan explained the concept of attitude in environmental perception studies as designating a “cultural stance” or a “position” developing over time as a function of an individual’s or a group’s encounters with different sites, views, and environments.77 Meanwhile, Ellis honed in on how learned ways of beholding and mentally ordering sites impacted current understandings of sites.

The artist’s contention that perspective impacted late 20th-century attitudes meshes with

Damisch’s observation that the spatial and visual paradigm epitomized by linear perspective cannot be reduced to the product of a particular time; rather, according to the art historian, perspective produces discernable new effects in the art, thought, culture, and science of later historical eras. 78 Ellis’s claims also concur with Hall’s implicit correlation of clichéd, “closed- score” vision with a culturally conditioned attitude. In Hall’s blunt words, the closed viewer

“sees what he has learned to see in the way he is ‘supposed’ to see it. . . .”79

In response to acquired perceptual attitudes informed by variants of linear perspective,

Ellis sought to challenge beholders with the illusory views of works such as Perspective

Construction. By encouraging viewers to unlearn entrenched “landscape attitudes,” the artist elaborated upon painter Ad Reinhardt’s dictum of 1946 that “Art teaches people how to see.”80

Ellis’s pedagogical slant also resonates with that of artist and educator Gyorgy Kepes’s

77 Tuan, Topophilia, 4.

78 Damisch, L’origine de la perspective, 49.

79 Hall, “Art, Space, and the Human Experience,” 53.

80 Ad Reinhardt, “How to Look at Things through a Wine-Glass,” PM, July 7, 1946, quoted in Lucy Lippard, “Tunnel Visions: Nancy Holt’s Art in the Public Eye,” in Nancy Holt: Sightlines, ed. Alena J. Williams (Berkeley: Univesity of California Press, 2011), 62. 177

Education of Vision (1965), a collection of essays by psychologists, scientists, and educators in art and design dedicated to what Kepes explained as the enrichment of the currently impoverished visual faculty of Western culture.81 In its historical context, Ellis extended the central precept of the 1972 BBC television series on art entitled Ways of Seeing, hosted by John

Berger. Critics couched their readings of the Landscape Morphology and Perceptual Tools series in pedagogical terms evoking earlier critical interpretations of NETCo’s outdoor works as lessons in roadside viewing. The documentation for the Canada Trajectoires 73 exhibit of

Canadian art at the Musée d’art moderne of Paris presented Ellis’s series as a “visual education.”82 After visiting this Paris show, critic Sandra Shaul distinguished Landscape

Morphology for its “academic artistry.”83 Upon viewing the series in the same year at the

Vancouver Art Gallery, Wheeler affirmed that “For me these works are exciting because through them we re-learn what it is to ‘see’ unconstrained by assumptions.”84

The artist’s project of perceptual re-education challenges Eurocentric models of viewing and interpreting sites. His viewfinder’s subversion of established landscape compositions and linear perspective exemplifies what curator Scott Watson has described as Ellis’s aim “to de- classify, de-Europeanize, our approach to landscape.”85 Whereas Watson did not develop this brief remark in his wide-ranging overview of Vancouver artists, the remainder of this section elaborates upon the viewfinder’s role in the artist’s “de-Europeanizing” approach to the historical and cultural tensions of his work’s British Columbian setting.

81 Gyorgy Kepes, “Introduction,” in Education of Vision (New York: George Braziller, 1965), iv.

82 “Dean Ellis,” in Canada Trajectoires 73 (Paris: Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, 1973), n.p.

83 Shaul, “Canadian Art in Paris,” 36.

84 Wheeler, “Dean Ellis,” 27.

85 Scott Watson, “Terminal City: Place, Culture, and the Regional Inflection,” in Vancouver: Art and Artists 1931-1983 (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1983), 232. 178

Ellis’s visual and attitudinal education undermines Eurocentric conceptions of visual mastery over Canadian sites as evident in the full title of Perspective Construction for the Salish.

As noted at the beginning of this chapter’s study of Ellis, the British Columbian Coast Salish fish trap was an important formal inspiration behind the work, a fact observed by Wheeler.86 The artwork recalls the upright framework of horizontal and vertical beams making up wooden salmon “weirs.” Hornby Island, Ellis’s residence during his artistic career, had been a seasonal home for the Coast Salish prior to the arrival of white settlers in the 19th century. A photograph taken in 1973, the year in which Ellis finished his Landscape Morphology series, depicts native fishermen standing on a long, narrow platform at the top of a weir built across the Cowichan

River. They spear salmon obstructed by narrowly spaced slats propped against the wooden structure [figure 31]. The system of diagonal and oblong planks supporting a trap of woven panels is also clearly visible in a late 19th-century photograph of a weir in British Columbia

[figure 32].87 A vestige of the trap’s mesh-like barrier recurs in the three slender branches stretched across the central V shape of Ellis’s work.

While the artist partially intended his viewfinder for beholders heir to Euro-Canadian

“perceptual attitudes,” the work’s title also designates the sculpture as being “for the Salish.”

This gift pays tribute to the potlatch exchange ceremonies of the Pacific Northwest native peoples. The work thus becomes a symbolic offering made in homage or atonement to a people for whom European conventions and spatial models have not been primary influences on their

86 Wheeler, “Dean Ellis,” 26. After writing this analysis of traps in Ellis’s art, I discovered the following anthropological analysis of traps in the works of contemporary artists Damien Hirst and Judith Horn; see Alfred Gell, “Vogel’s Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps,” Journal of Material Culture 1 (March 1996): 30-32.

87 For illustrations of fish weirs and diagrams of other wooden traps used for hunting mammals, see Reg Ashwell, Coast Salish: Their Art, Culture and Legends (Saanichton, BC: Hancock House, 1978), 29, 32, 49. On the ownership of weirs and the ancestral narratives associated with them, see Brian David Thom, “Coast Salish Senses of Place: Dwelling, Meaning, Power, Property and Territory in the Coast Salish World,” (PhD dissertation, McGill University, 2005), 320-321. 179 complex relationship with the natural environment. At the same time, Ellis’s title satirizes the colonizer’s condescending philanthropic gesture of bestowing knowledge, culture, and reason upon native subjects. In addition, Perspective Construction attacks colonialism as the weir is a politically charged object. In the late 19th century, the Canadian government restricted the activity of aboriginals in fishery by first limiting, then banning, the employment of the highly useful weirs in 1888 to favour the “Euro-Canadian” commercial fishery and salmon canneries.88

The weir is thus a cogent emblem of uneven power relations, state-supported discrimination, and ongoing conflicts over land. Mired in perceptual confusion, the non-native viewer also occupies an ethically and politically uncertain position. Moreover, in Wheeler’s words, this weir-like sculpture “plays on . . . the same ambiguity we feel when looking at West Coast Indian technology isolated as artifacts within the tombs of our culture, our museums.”89 The Euro-

Canadian subjects implied by “we” and “our,” pronouns including Wheeler and Ellis, no longer wield an appropriating, privileged colonialist gaze. Rather, beholders are addressed as discomforted, anxious, and guilty heirs to colonialist practices of employing vision and violence for appropriating sites and subjugating people.

With his viewfinder, the artist entraps the perspectivally conditioned Eurocentric beholder. Standing before the work, the beholder occupies the point of view of prey approaching a salmon weir or a log deadfall, a wooden trap for land mammals. Whereas an authentic Salish weir is a practical, efficacious tool, Ellis’s trap is a ruse. The beholder is lured into and ensnared in a series of irresolvable visual puzzles in a scrambled site: one is made conscious of being visually befuddled by misperceptions and false perceptions. This work’s strategy is both to

88 “Fishing, aboriginal,” in Encyclopedia of British Columbia, ed. Daniel Francis (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing, 2000). For recent scholarship on the Coast Salish, see Be of Good Mind: Essays on the Coast Salish, ed. Bruce Granville Miller (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007).

89 Wheeler, “Dean Ellis,” 26. 180 capture and visually captivate. Perspective Construction deploys a trickery which the artist referred to in a letter of circa 1977 as “the visual deception [characteristic] of a lot of [my] earlier work.” He elaborated that in the wake of the Watergate scandal of 1972, he grew increasingly interested in using art to intentionally manifest ambiguity and mendacious dissimulations in his site-specific works, photographic documentation, and slide projections.90 By making viewers aware of “visual deception” in the form of optical illusions in and around the viewfinder land artwork, Ellis expands the concept of site to include multiple, even incompatible, sights, readings, and cultural attitudes.

Perspective Construction may thus be interpreted as a variation upon French poet Charles

Baudelaire’s valorizing of falsity in landscape art as a route to authenticity. The poet advanced this idea in his review of the Salon of 1859. To Baudelaire, dioramas and painted backdrops used in theatre conveyed an authentic commentary on human nature insofar as the artifice of such imagery appealed to beholders’ imaginations, emotions, desires, and cogitations. He explained that “These things [illusionistic, popular landscape imagery], because they are false, are infinitely closer to the real, whereas the majority of our landscape painters are liars precisely because they have neglected to lie.” While the poet yearned for the self-apparent falseness and enticing illusions of landscapes in public entertainment,91 Ellis crafted deliberate optical deception to question assumptions behind established ways of seeing and to suggest alternate, underexplored forms of beholding sites. Poet and artist attested to a plurality of truths in lieu of a monolithic conception of the visible. Through the viewfinder, Ellis snared beholders to liberate perceptual attitudes towards sites.

90 Dean Ellis to unnamed recipient, circa 1977, in Studies and Other Initial Works (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1977), n.p.

91 Charles Baudelaire, Curiosités esthétiques (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1868), 338. 181

CHAPTER THREE: FIGURES 19-32

Images were removed due to copyright restrictions.

Figure 22. Barbara and Michael Leisgen, Description of the Sun, 1975. Performance in a field, black and white photograph on canvas. 120 cm x 180 cm. 183

Figure 23. Claude Lorrain (Claude Gellée), The Roman Campagna, circa 1639. Oil on canvas. 101.6 cm x 135.9 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Figure 24. Dean Ellis, untitled image from the series of 160 slides entitled Grounds, 1974. Colour photograph, 35 mm slide. Courtesy of Richard Prince. 184

Figure 25. Albrecht Dürer, Draughtsman Making a Perspective Drawing of a Woman, illustration from Unterweysung der Messung, 2nd ed. (Nuremberg: 1538).

Figure 26. Betty Edwards, “What Dürer saw; an approximation,” in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, 1979), 117.

185

Figure 27. Perspective Machine, illustration from Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola, Le due regole della prospettiva pratica . . . con i comentarij del R. P. M. Egnatio Danti, ed. Ignazio Danti (Rome: 1583).

Figure 29. Richard Long, England 1967, 1967. Rectangular frame and circle on grass in a park. Black and white photograph. 124 cm x 88 cm. Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London.

187

Figures 31 and 32. Above: Coast Salish fishermen standing on a weir and spearing salmon in the Cowichan River, British Columbia, 1973. Below: Coast Salish weir with trap and movable woven panels, British Columbia, 19th century. Reproduced in Reg Ashwell, Coast Salish: Their Art, Culture and Legends (Saanichton, BC: Hancock House Publishers, 1978), 29. 188

CHAPTER FOUR. SHIFTING SIGHTLINES: THE LAKESIDE VIEWFINDER OF ROBIN MACKENZIE, 1973-1974

Mutable Prospects

In a 1963 Canadian Art article, New York art critic Clement Greenberg insightfully detected a “hallucinatory note . . . in many Canadian landscape paintings” by 20th-century modernist artists.1 His reference to distorted perception and an altered state of consciousness presents Canadian landscape art as undermining the reliability of seeing and the materiality of site. Merging fact with figment, the psychedelic site is both a view and a vision. Although the critic referenced painting exclusively, his words encapsulate issues pertaining to the subjective viewing of sites as explored by Canadian land artists at the end of the decade in which his article was published and at the beginning of the 1970s. Greenberg’s emphasis on scenery incompatible with, or divergent from, actual reality evokes both NETCo’s fascination with cinematic experiences of views made unfamiliar and Ellis’s interest in optical illusions, trompe l’oeil, and projections of dream-like scenery. The site-specific works of land artists also amplified

Greenberg’s reading of painting by presenting perceptual distortion as a process of transformation rather than as a static image of unreal scenery. A hallucinatory apparition appears, exists in, and even creates, its own time and space in which it undergoes, as emphasized by land artists, a series of visible alterations and metamorphoses. Such process-based, durational qualities are reinforced (inadvertently on Greenberg’s part) by the musical overtones of a

“hallucinatory note.”

This intersection of process, change, and the psychedelic offers an informative point of entry into the fluctuating sites delineated by the land artworks of Ontarian Robin Mackenzie (b.

1938, Pickering, Ontario –2004). The artist was a cattle farmer and former high school teacher

1 Clement Greenberg, “Clement Greenberg’s View of Art on the Prairies: Painting and Sculpture in Prairie Canada Today,” Canadian Art 20 (March/April 1963): 98. 189 who became a prolific “self-taught” artist living and working on his family farm in Pickering

Township.2 After building electronic, kinetic sculptures in the late sixties, he turned to explore natural ecosystems and organic processes in the seventies through landscape photography as well as outdoor works of stones and indoor gallery installations of bales of hay, germinating seedlings, and artfully piled logs. In contrast to the limited critical attention received by Ellis,

Mackenzie’s works appeared in numerous exhibition catalogues, art journals, and newspapers in the 1970s. Mackenzie’s art typically explored outdoor sites or site-specific materials through continuous or repeated serial viewing (as defined in the second chapter).

I examine the serial visual distortions and spatial transmutations generated by a site- specific, sculptural land artwork which Mackenzie assembled from twine and stones in 1973.

This chapter continues the previous chapter’s argument that the viewfinders of land artists generated visually ambiguous, unstable sites. Akin to Ellis’s Perspective Construction for the

Salish, Mackenzie’s work reprises the essential function of a viewfinder (defined in Chapter

Three) by visually delimiting and geometrically formatting a site within a broader environment.

The latter artist set up a complex interplay between visual and spatial details internal and external to the boundaries of the actual viewfinder. Mackenzie’s work is a companion piece to

Ellis’s Perspective Construction and yet registers strikingly different optical effects and models of viewing. Mackenzie’s work is distinct from that of Ellis as it is a horizontal viewfinder cropping a series of fluctuating views of ground and water for a perambulatory viewer.

Furthermore, Mackenzie devised a viewfinder functioning on multiple spatial planes and angles in divergence from Ellis’s interest in a frontal, unidirectional viewing of sites. As this chapter

2 Robin Mackenzie, artist biography, undated, Mackenzie, Robin 1938-, Canadian Artists File, E.P. Taylor Research Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

190 discusses in detail, the forms and physical placement of Mackenzie’s viewfinder invite the beholder to assume multiple viewing positions in the site and thereby to explore the optical plenitude afforded by a network of sightlines running downward and across the viewfinder and sweeping beyond.

The viewfinder by Mackenzie examined in this chapter occupied a rock-littered, lakeside site in Scotland. Reminiscent of Ellis, Mackenzie chose an anonymous, nondescript spot by a loch in a district otherwise renowned as a tourist destination and populated by an established community. However, while Ellis expressed an affinity for the shoreline by assembling

Perspective Construction at the water’s edge, Mackenzie privileged the lakeside by creating a serial work expanding horizontally across land and water. The shore per se does not figure prominently in Mackenzie’s site. In other words, he was more preoccupied with the laterality of the site than with its liminality. As he intervened in an enclosed body of water, the artist also incorporated the surrounding environs, including nearby landforms and vegetation, into the purview of his viewfinder. He also displayed his preference for the horizontal sweep of a site through his viewfinder’s delineation of the physical surfaces and textures of ground and water.

This loch-side viewfinder was visible in situ during late summer of 1973 by both a local and international audience during the Edinburgh Festival and was circulated extensively in photographs in galleries and Canadian publications.

My analysis of Mackenzie develops another facet of this study’s main hypothesis that land artists destabilized the coherence and fixity conventionally associated with sites. This chapter posits that Mackenzie’s viewfinder delineates a site whose contours, placement, and appearance are in continuous flux. His work thereby challenges the assumptions that a site need be singular or consistently visible over time. This chapter commences by presenting a horizontal 191 viewfinder by Mackenzie, The Same Length of Line Connecting 1, 2, 3, 4 (1973-1974). The chapter pursues its argument by tracing Mackenzie’s development of a site with a mutable appearance with reference to three key issues—(a) the processes of transformation contributing to the site’s malleable appearance and shifting location across sightlines, (b) the interaction of the body with the viewfinder, and (c) the work’s critical response to the history of geographical surveying in Canada in the wake of the nationalist climate of the country’s Centenary. I further situate this work in the artist’s political activism in defense of the integrity of local sites in

Ontario. As with the discussion of Ellis’s work, this chapter emphasizes Mackenzie’s work as a sculptural land art installation rather than a conceptual photographic work as has been maintained by critics of the 1970s. I conclude by reuniting Mackenzie and Ellis to discuss the commonalities in their conceptions of site and sight.

Land Lines

On the shore of Scotland’s longest freshwater lake, Loch Awe, northwest of Glasgow,

Mackenzie constructed The Same Length of Line Connecting 1, 2, 3, 4 between July 28 to

September 6, 1973, for the Edinburgh Festival [figure 33].3 Loch Awe is famed as the site of crannogs (ancient lake-dwellings unique to Scotland and Ireland) and medieval ruins, including

Kilchurn castle. Above the lake towers the imposing mountain Ben Cruachan. Folklorists studied the Loch as the habitat of mythical beasts and supernatural beings.4 Amidst these historical surroundings, Mackenzie selected a relatively nondescript area for his land work. In distinction from Ellis’s upright, stationary structure, Mackenzie devised a horizontal viewfinder that

3 Robin Mackenzie, Chronology, undated, 12, Mackenzie, Robin 1938– Doc/Ca, Library and Archives of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

4 On the mythical inhabitants of Loch Awe, see Jennifer Westwood and Sophia Kingshill, The Lore of Scotland: A Guide to Scottish Legends (London: Arrow Books, 2011), s.v. “Loch Awe.”

192 gradually appeared through four stages of interconnected points and lines on ground and in water. He wrapped nearly sixty-one metres of coarse twine around irregularly shaped rocks on land choked with stones, rock fragments, and sparse patches of grass.5 Joe Bodolai, who interviewed Mackenzie in 1974, reported that the artist selected “hard dark rocks” which “were found on the site and not moved.”6 The quantity of rocks in each stage corresponds with the numbers in the title. Mackenzie strapped odd numbers of stones in tight clusters. For even amounts, he looped the twine around distanced rocks. After working with stones on land for the first three phases, he waded into the Loch for the final phase and lassoed twine around four stones to form a quadrangle.

The Same Length of Line is a horizontally expanding viewfinder guiding a perambulating beholder to occupy multiple viewing positions around the work. The work crops areas of earth for inspection and plots strategic observation points orienting the viewer’s line of sight from many angles, resulting in a network of sightlines crisscrossing the bounded area and its surroundings. Mackenzie documented his intervention in a series of twelve black-and-white photographs taken from various angles and distances and displayed in a large block measuring nearly two and a half by three metres.7 As with the system of lines and points charted by the twine and stones, the grid of photos permits multidirectional readings of serial views across horizontal rows and vertical columns.

1,2,3,4 is one of the most sustained, complex examinations of outdoor, site-specific seeing by an artist more often recognized for his indoor gallery installations and landscape

5 Mackenzie’s length of string measured 60.96 metres or 200 feet.

6 Bodolai, “Borderlines in Art and Experience” (includes a paraphrased interview with Robin Mackenzie), 75.

7 For specific measurements of the series and the individual photographs, see Robin Mackenzie, Camera Pieces for One-Man (Touring) International Exhibition, undated, Mackenzie, Robin 1938– Doc/Ca, Library and Archives of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. 193 photographs. Critics of the 1970s foregrounded the role of sight in the beholder’s encounter with this in situ work. Curator Robin S. Karson referenced 1,2,3,4 when writing in 1978 that

Mackenzie “looks to establish for the viewer the record of an important human experience— vision—and to investigate through variations in time, space, and color what he has called a

‘sense of site.’”8 In the same year, curator Kes Woodward emphasized in a passage accompanying 1,2,3,4 that “His [Mackenzie’s] works have an immediate visual impact which yields on prolonged inspection an enormous range of insight into the structure of landscape and the act of seeing.”9 The following sections nuance such readings by delving into how 1,2,3,4 problematizes seeing sites.

Declared Sites

I now examine this viewfinder as a serial work yielding an ambiguously bordered site altering throughout the artist’s creative labours and the beholder’s visual experience. Implicit in this section is a consideration of time, a prominent theme in the writings of critics, curators, and scholars on Mackenzie since the early 1970s. Authors singled out the artist’s exploration of the cyclical time of plant growth and decay, the extended duration of the beholder’s examining of his serial photographs (such images themselves capturing moments in time), and the evolution of natural systems in his indoor gallery works. 10 Meanwhile, I now turn to the related, yet less-

8 Robin S. Karson, Silence and Slow Time: Jake Berthot, Robin Mackenzie, Clement Meadmore, Salvatore Romano (South Hadley, MA: Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, 1978), 13.

9 Kes Woodward, New Possibilities: Works from the Canadian Art Bank (Anchorage: Arts Alaska Inc., 1978), n.p.

10 Regarding time in Mackenzie’s art, see the following chronologically ordered texts: Gary Michael Dault, “In the Galleries: Toronto,” Artscanada 27 (December 1970/January 1971): 54; Peter Wilson, “A Man Who Makes Art out of Bales of Hay and Things,” Toronto Star, September 25, 1971, 57; Walter Klepac, “The Subversions of Art 1,” Guerilla 2:19, October 20, 1971, 17; Walter Klepac, “The Subversions of Art 2,” Guerilla 2:22, November 10, 1971, n.p. [This article, as preserved in the Mackenzie, Robin 1938– Doc/Ca, Artist File, Library and Archives of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, lacks page numbers]; John Noel Chandler, “The Artist in the Landscape: Robin Mackenzie,” Artscanada 29 (February/March 1972): 35; Peter Perrin, “The Sense of Site,” Artscanada 34 194 examined, subject of the artist’s conception of sites as visible manifestations of metamorphosis.

Although lined by rocks, Mackenzie’s sites are far from immutably set in stone.

By approaching 1,2,3,4 as a viewfinder tracing a fluctuating site, my study also departs from previous interpretations of this work as a static map. Most critical reception of the 1970s privileged a cartographic reading of 1,2,3,4 as a set of physical markers fixing the coordinates and measurements of a finite area, in keeping with the widespread interest in mapping amongst conceptual and earthworks artists. Bodolai highlighted this work in his eminent 1974 Artscanada survey of Canadian and international artists engaging with themes and imagery pertaining to maps, atlases, and aerial photography. For Bodolai, 1,2,3,4 demonstrated cartographic strategies

“which deal with qualities of location, distance, and boundary”11 as spatial phenomena both objectively measureable and subjectively experienced.12 Mackenzie’s charting of the earth also captivated the curators of the Edmonton Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Ontario who, in 1976, included 1,2,3,4 as an example of conceptual art revealing “spacial [sic] definitions” and

“measurements” in Changing Visions, a major touring exhibition of Canadian landscape art.13

Whereas such readings portray the work as a collection of isolated, fixed site-diagrams, the artist envisioned the four groupings of stones as stages of ongoing transformation.

Mackenzie’s work is thus a transmogrifying, dynamic map. He glossed the work as a cartography of change in key words written on notecards stored with photographic slides of

(May/June 1977): 9; Jeffrey Wechsler, A Response to the Environment (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Art Gallery, 1975), n.p.; Karson, Silence and Slow Time, 13, 18; Martha Langford, Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007),147-149.

11 Bodolai, “Borderlines in Art and Experience,” 75.

12 Ibid., 77.

13 Jeanne Parkin, “Changing Visions—The Canadian Landscape,” Art Magazine 7 (March/April 1976): 12. 195

1,2,3,4. The first stage, in which one stone is wrapped with twine, he named “positions.”

Subsequent stages he designated in order as “distances,” “triangulations,” and finally, “sites.”14

Mackenzie’s flashcards imply that 1,2,3,4 does not merely regroup quantifiable data but, more significantly, construes a flow of events from the genesis of an isolated position on the shore to its entry into the watery depths. In the culminating moment, the “triangulation” expands into a larger aqueous “site” circumscribed by the cord.

The visible development of the site encompassed by the viewfinder evokes biological and mathematical metaphors of incremental growth. Analogous to an organism, the site begins as a small unit and germinates through distinguishable stages into a larger, more complex whole.

Organisms multiply through an alternating pattern of stones fusing or fertilizing (in the first and third stages) and splitting, as in mitosis (in the second and fourth). For Mackenzie, objects not only grew as organic entities but were beings animated by a special form of physical and spiritual life. One critic reported that during an interview of circa 1973, Mackenzie named “the spiritual history of karma or growth of a thing its expended energy.”15 As a mathematically inspired installation, the work also consists of the extension of isolated points by lines, the joining of lines to form angles, and the connecting of angles in a quadrilateral. Mackenzie’s work is thus a land art exercise in plane geometry to plot the growth of a site across numerically ordered phases comprised of smaller sub-sites. If the rocks-and-rope viewfinder is a sequential diagram of the site’s increase, the final stage maps the site’s plenitude.

Another growth analogy likens the attainment of holistic visual perception of the expanded site of 1,2,3,4 with the dawning of a new state of consciousness. The spatial

14 See Robin Mackenzie’s notecards reproduced in Bodolai, “Borderlines in Art and Experience,” 75.

15 Mia Kalavinka, “Inside the Temple of Killed or Born Stones” (includes an interview with Robin Mackenzie), Artscanada 30 (February/March 1973): 20.

196 broadening of this site, for art critic Amy Goldin, was equivalent to an “opening-up of awareness.” In a review of the work for Art in America of 1977, she wrote that “Each binding [of stones] focuses on the implications of a mental Gestalt. . . . The final image has the serenity of inclusive consciousness, a state in which earlier discriminations of lines of vision, rocks [,] and environment give way to wholeness.”16 According to this reading, the site blossoms into an integrated unity with a corresponding enrichment of the beholder’s awareness.

Details of the work reveal that the viewfinder traces the site’s accretion according to an unpredictable, irregular sequence. The string wraps tensile circuits of morphing dimensions around a site transforming through elastic, oppositional movements: the site stretches, as in the jump from one stone to two and from three to four, and contracts, as when the two distanced boulders snap back into a tight huddle of three. In each stage, the viewfinder delineates a different area of ground. Transitions between compact masses and dispersed constellations of rocks create a pulsating rhythm suggestive of concentrations and releases of energy or even alternating centrifugal and centripetal motions causing the site to whirl into existence. The final stage introduces further unexpected twists in this erratic development as the viewfinder shifts from shore to water and thereby couples horizontal expansion with reflection. Mackenzie’s understated work reveals that change governs the site’s existence.

Moreover, the malleable spatial properties of the Loch Awe site have a photographic corollary. As an inventive, conscientious photographer, the artist recorded The Same Length of

Line not in a grid of equally sized units but in rows of slightly differing dimensions. The horizontal rows are all of equal width yet vary in height. The first and third rows are both about sixty-eight centimetres high, while the second and fourth rows are approximately forty-nine and

16 Amy Goldin, “Report from Toronto & Montreal,” Art in America 65 (March/April 1977): 42. 197 sixty centimetres in height respectively.17 These shifts in size and formatting have the effect of a visual field alternately expanding and narrowing, suggestive of a dilating pupil or a squinting eye attempting to take in a diversity of views.

The unpredictable phases of the viewfinder chart fluctuating micro-sites generated by shifting sightlines. Mackenzie’s work invites the beholder to walk around the stones and appreciate visual distortions. Through parallel, taut lengths of string, Mackenzie adroitly exploited effects of foreshortening and recession evident in the warping of proportions, borders, and scale throughout the site’s progression. For example, depending on one’s vantage point, the string around the sub-site in the second stage might cordon off a narrow, roughly rectangular slice of ground, a wider, squat wedge, or a diagonally slanted parallelogram. Intermediary viewing positions offer countless other variations of the site as it stretches, shrinks, and tapers.

The outline of the fourth stage varies greatly according to whether the viewer is on land or in water. The rocks in Loch Awe stake out an ambiguously shaped site developing through parallax. The visible upper halves of the boulders, conjoined with their reflections below, resemble whole stones floating in a transparent medium or planets orbiting in outer space, as captured in Mackenzie’s photographs. His paradoxical, illusory site illustrates what he explained to Bodolai as “declared space,” a subjective spatial experience, especially of anomalies, coexisting with, yet irreducible to, measurable, logical properties.18

The distorted site expands through mobile, serial viewing. Walkers profit from countless, crisscrossing lines of sight and viewing positions. Excerpts from Mackenzie’s notes of the mid- seventies support his conception of site as produced through multidirectional viewing:

“constructing landscape is not the single view/ spaces (before) objects/ spaces as objects/ a

17 Mackenzie, Camera Pieces, 1.

18 Bodolai, “Borderlines,” (includes an interview with Mackenzie), 77. 198 series/ linked/ overlapped/ continuous/ serial,”19 “a continuum of spaces/ . . . within reach of fixed looks/ . . . not single view sequences.”20 Mackenzie further conceived of each phase of

1,2,3,4 as enfolding numerous possible contents. In another batch of notes, he referred to each section in the plural: “positions,” “distances,” “triangulations,” and most significantly, “sites.”21

For the artist, a declared site was a chain of views, a flow of visual experience. Although the sequencing of 1,2,3,4 suggests an aggregate of interconnected views, the work also discloses contrasts and discontinuities of form and location. Hence, I read Mackenzie’s ambiguously organized site as a permutation of what Robert Smithson designated in an essay of 1971 as an

“open landscape,” a site characterized by its “uncertainty” and “which embodies multiple views, some of which are contradictory, whose purpose is to reveal a clash of angles and orders within a sense of simultaneity; this shatters any predictable frame of reference.”22

It is on account of its openness, as defined by Smithson, that Mackenzie’s view-in- process of Loch Awe may be compared with certain features of Ellis’s work. The horizontal, serial structure of 1,2,3,4 and its appeal to a walking beholder contrast with the vertical, solitary

Perspective Construction designed for a static viewer. Nonetheless, both viewfinder-works present temporary, ambiguous sites comprised of multiple, even divergent views. The “clash of angles and orders” evident in the forms and placement of the stones and string of Mackenzie’s viewfinder arises in other permutations in Ellis’s combining of distance illusions in Perspective

19 Robin Mackenzie, notes, circa 1970s, reproduced in The Robert McLaughlin Gallery Bulletin (Oshawa, ON: Robert McLaughlin Gallery, November 1976), n.p., Mackenzie, Robin 1938-, Canadian Artists file, E.P. Taylor Research Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

20 Robin Mackenzie, notes, circa 1976, reproduced in Photographic Sequences (Peterborough, ON: Art Gallery of Peterborough, 1983), n.p.

21 Mackenzie, notes, circa 1973, reproduced in Bodolai, “Borderlines,” 75.

22 Robert Smithson, “Art Through the Camera’s Eye” (circa 1971), reprinted in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 374. 199

Construction as well as in the layering of prospects photographed from various angles and distances in his fantastical Grounds series.

To return to Mackenzie’s work, less expansive ocular movements across the viewfinder’s details also contribute to the visual discernment of the warped site of 1,2,3,4. The geometric outlines of the viewfinder direct the eyes to glide across taut lines while the rough textures and irregular forms of the bulky masses invite closer inspection. This mobile sight approximates

“analytical looking,” a technique of training eyesight as proposed by British novelist and essayist

Aldous Huxley in The Art of Seeing (1943). Huxley had been afflicted with near blindness in his youth, followed by severely impaired vision, before recovering his sight through a regimen of ocular re-education. In this book, he united the philosophical, psychological, and practical aspects of vision to offer a program, inspired by various oculists, in disciplining the eyes without eye-glasses. The defective seer adhering to this method must first renounce static staring, an unproductive and straining habit. Visual and mental concentration then gradually improve through “analytical looking,” defined as relaxed, “small-scale shifting” 23or a continuous

“piecemeal” seeing of an object, face, or scene.24 The eyes freely dart in small movements from one detail to another, resulting in an increased familiarity with the scene viewed and the discovery of previously unnoticed features. Such viewing, according to Huxley, also facilitates remembering visual data.25 This model of viewing (if not all of the specific exercises) of

Huxley’s Art of Seeing vividly encapsulates the attentive, sustained, ocular micro-shifts elicited by the viewfinder and the conception of the morphing site as an accumulation of visual details.

23Aldous Huxley, The Art of Seeing (London: Chatto & Windus, 1943; repr., London: Flamingo, 1994), 75. Citations refer to the 1994 edition. Huxley based his exercises in part on the methods of American oculist W. H. Bates. It is unclear as to what extent analytical cubism may also have influenced Huxley’s discussion of analytical looking.

24 Ibid., 76.

25 Ibid.,76-78. 200

Piecemeal looking reveals the unfolding of the viewfinder through the interplay of sameness and difference. Amidst flux, the string otherwise referred to in the work’s title as The

Same Length of Line is the literal and thematic connecting thread between the stages of site expansion. Both string and stones are examples of what Mackenzie called “reference points,” objects or visible phenomena enabling artist and viewer to verify and compare different stages of his work’s existence.26 Regardless of whether he reused the same twine or multiple cords, the string remains the same total length throughout the work while appearing to alter in length and width. When joining even numbers of stones, the thin, knotless twine approximates a straight line between points. By the fourth stage, the string is stretched nearly flush across the surface of the water and approaches near flatness. When lacing odd numbers of stones, the twine assumes a textural, even sculptural quality: neatly wound layers of coarse, bristling fibres weave a wide band occasionally unravelling over the sharp corners of the dark stones. The string here resembles an organic growth on the rocks and complements the many rough, irregular surfaces on a shore carpeted in stone shards and straggling grass.

Mackenzie’s notes further hint at how the internal relationships amongst the stone and string yield a mutable site. Exhibition catalogues usually refer to the work as The Same Length of

Line Connecting 1, 2, 3, 4. However, the artist coined a telling alternate title emphasizing the unstable appearance of the work over time: Four Temporary Conditions—Connectings with the

Same Length of Line. Mackenzie supplied this latter title to Bodolai for the Artscanada mapping survey article.27 The “connectings” register a series of “conditions,” that is, ephemeral states, qualities, or circumstances. Evoking cycles of health and illness, the conditions manifest the

26 Dault, “In the Galleries” (includes an interview with Robin Mackenzie), 54.

27 Bodolai, “Borderlines,” 75. 201 site’s variability. In contractual terms, the conditions embody antecedents for the undetermined, final state of the site.

The artist’s brief notes indicate the conditions as qualities expressive of each of the four connectings. A pair of stones reaches an “agreement” for which the arrival of a third provides

“confirmation.”28 Amy Goldin later read 1,2,3,4 as “suggesting opposition, confirmation, dominance [,] or equality.” 29 Both sets of terms interpret formal and spatial characteristics of the stone arrangements as social and political relationships, whether of reciprocity and collective solidarity, in Mackenzie’s notes, or of conflict, in Goldin’s more overtly politicized words. The work’s lesser-used title thus alludes to the artist’s grappling with the human condition.

Mackenzie sharpened his equation of politics with sculptural form and placement in an interview with Mia Kalavinka in 1973, the year of the creation of 1,2,3,4. She reported his derision of the

“preconceptions” of “vertical sculpture” as “fascist” and connotative of presumptuous self- elevation.30 The spirit behind Mackenzie’s anti-vertical views recalls Ellis’s proposal, through his Landscape as Metaphor series (1974), of an empowering female “antithesis to the phallic landscape” of Emily Carr’s paintings of monumental totem poles and towering trees.31 For

Mackenzie, to politicize art through horizontality was to assert his ethical stance. His comments implicitly equate rootedness to the ground with both personal humility and social equality.

Reflecting on Mackenzie’s determination to give artistic form to humans’ “struggles for . . . integrity and sense of uprightness,” Kalavinka continued, “For this reason Mackenzie keeps his pieces close to the ground. The idea of what it would mean if a stone were hung on a wall repels

28 Bodolai, “Borderlines,” (includes an interview with Mackenzie), 75.

29 Goldin, “Report from Toronto & Montreal,” 42. The critic did not specify if she had consulted Mackenzie’s notecards.

30 Kalavinka, “Inside the Temple” (includes an interview with Robin Mackenzie), 20.

31 Ryan, “Dean Ellis,” (includes an interview with Ellis), n.p. 202 him.”32 A utopian subtext of progress underpins the dialectical movements of 1,2,3,4’s site whose oppositional, erratic expansions and contractions acquire overtones of strife potentially culminating in resolution.

The work, however, refrains from a definitive conclusion as the fourth condition is the most elaborate visual conundrum in this fluctuating site-in-progress. Once the site appears to reach its fullest spatial expansion, the horizontal viewfinder is lost from view. As seen from the shore, the quadrangular site is the most visually indiscernible stage of the work. Barely visible above the surface of the Loch, the twine forms a nebulous physical boundary around the declared site. The four stones pinpointing the corners are difficult to distinguish from countless other stones of various sizes both inside and outside the confines of the twine. In contrast to their counterparts on land, the stones in the water provide less specific cues as to the site’s boundaries, dimensions, and location. The viewfinder and the indeterminate site within melt into the external environment. In Mackenzie’s photographs, Loch Awe’s waters blend with the sky in a misty expanse of floating, amorphous shapes. Trees and higher ground on the far shore hover in atmospheric washes of gray, echoing Ellis’s reminiscence of being adrift in foggy coastal waters.

The work’s title also highlights the ambiguity of this final stage: 1,2,3,4 evades a solely teleological reading by hinting at a lengthier series of 5,6,7,8, ad infinitum. Thus, this potentially unfinished site exemplifies the assertion made by Mackenzie in 1970 that underlying his process- based art “there is the other state of the work’s potential beyond what your present involvement with it is.”33 The site’s apotheosis in 1,2,3,4 captures both the “accumulation” and

“disintegration of a sense of site,”34 to borrow from the artist’s words. While Mackenzie’s site

32 Kalavinka, “Inside the Temple” (includes an interview with Mackenzie), 20.

33 Dault, “In the Galleries: Toronto” (includes an interview with Mackenzie), 54.

203 remains solidly rooted to the ground and clearly visible during the first three phases of its existence, the transformations outlined by the string culminate in watery erosion. The fourth visible stage and the suggestion of future permutations underwater reveal that the mature condition of this unstable site is its ultimate disappearance from view.

Somatic Stonework

The development and vanishing of the site are inextricable from an embodied viewing that integrates sight with movement and touch. Mackenzie’s art accomplishes a fuller sensorial integration than NETCo’s window-gazing and Ellis’s stationary observation. As already analyzed regarding 1,2,3,4, altering visual deformations depend upon the viewer’s location, angle of sight, and walking speed. This section focuses more specifically on the role of corporeal experience and mobile beholding in the emergence of the visually unstable site near Loch Awe. I examine 1,2,3,4 through the lens of Mackenzie’s physically demanding working methods and the viewer’s winding strolls.

The ethereal site by Loch Awe was effectuated in part by the artist’s physical manipulation of matter. Squatting on the shore and splashing into water, Mackenzie meticulously secured the prickly twine. The cumbersome stones required more force and stamina, likely resulting in calluses, bruises, and strains. Although the artist used stones found on site, it is probable that he first manually split some of them. The single stone in the first stage of the work is composed of a pair of angular rocks of congruent shapes, one of which is fractured into two additional pieces. The “one” stone is thus two or three fitted segments. To split them, the artist would have used a technique acuminated on stones on his farm in Pickering around 1973, as in the found granite and limestone Split Stone Pieces (1973-circa 1976) [figure 34]. The artist

34 Peter Perrin, “The Sense of Site” (includes an interview with Mackenzie), Artscanada 34 (May/June 1977): 8. The artist originally made this comment with regard to his photographic works Towards Drone Piece and Away from Drone Piece (1975-1976). 204 explained that he would first identify the unique grain or ideal “splitting direction” of a stone by striking it with a hammer, a process he called “sounding.”35 A few deft hacks from a sledge hammer split the stone which the artist then either left on site or installed in a gallery. Some works required the additionally taxing effort of lugging the stones down a hill.36 This strenuous stonework is captured in a series of photographs from the early 1970s [figure 35]. Mackenzie is nearly doubled over, knee-high in grass and wildflowers. He strains to heave an oblong boulder onto one end. After sounding the rock’s fault line, he raises a sledge hammer above his head and whacks it down. The massive boulder cleaves apart like a giant fossilized egg or an oyster shell from which he extracts two smaller morsels. Mackenzie’s art-making approximates manual labour rather than sculpting, an identification he encouraged by representing himself in catalogues and journals through visual references to farming and masonry, as in a photograph of himself amidst sledge hammers, axes, and saws in the workshop of his farm,37 fittingly named

“Stonecraft.” In a feature piece on Mackenzie for Artscanada, John Noel Chandler juxtaposed images of the artist’s work with a photo of an elaborate stone wall along a neighbouring farm.38

Repeated physical exertion, in tandem with sight, enhanced the artist’s acquisition of knowledge about a site and its contents. Through a methodical process merging masonry with athletic discipline, Mackenzie developed a finely tuned tactile and mental awareness (which

NETCo might have referred to as “sensitivity”). This prolonged corporeal interaction with everchanging materials in a given location prompted art critic Walter Klepac to write in 1971 that

35 Angelo Sgabelloni, “Robin Mackenzie: The Long Vertical 1974/75 and The Split Stone Pieces” (includes an interview with Robin Mackenzie), Queen Street Magazine, Winter/Spring 1976/1977, 62, Mackenzie, Robin 1938– Doc/Ca, Library and Archives of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

36 Kalavinka, “Inside the Temple” (includes an interview with Mackenzie), 20.

37 See Eight from Toronto (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1975), n.p.

38 See the photograph of the wall in Chandler, “The Artist in the Landscape,” 40. 205

“After two weeks Mackenzie comes to know the piece through feeling the day to day differences in his muscles and bones. There is a kind of physical identity with the piece.”39 The artist affirmed the physically taxing nature of making and interpreting art, and by extension, of occupying the locations of site-specific art, when he remarked that “I don’t think there is such a thing as meaning without pain.”40 For Mackenzie, bodily anguish and potential danger were intrinsic to navigating stony places. A year prior to creating 1,2,3,4, he was initiated into

“undulation,” his term for the difficult writhing required to scale the perilously steep, narrow stone steps of pyramids in Yucatán during his trip to Mexico.41

Following 1,2,3,4’s difficult birth, the viewfinder infuses its new site with life by prescribing paths for walking. As the work’s first beholder, Mackenzie documented 1,2,3,4 from multiple angles to capture the site’s visible alterations throughout his orbit around the boulders.

In his notes, the artist recorded the number of bodily locations from which he shot each phase of the site’s growth: “two positions” for the third phase of triangulation and “three positions” for the other phases.42 Mackenzie’s capturing of his own movements has inspired much writing on the role of the body in his art. Since the 1970s, authors have considered how his series of landscape photographs, containing multiple sequences of views, capture frozen moments of a

39 Walter Klepac, “The Subversions of Art 2,” Guerilla 2:22, November 10, 1971, n.p. This article, as preserved in Mackenzie, Robin 1938– Doc/Ca, Library and Archives of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, lacks complete page numbers.

40 Kalavinka, “Inside the Temple” (includes an interview with Mackenzie), 20.

41 Ibid., 21. This article juxtaposes photographs of the pyramids with illustrations of a series of split-stone gallery works. Mackenzie shared a passion for Central American archaeology with Smithson and Heizer. Regarding the influence upon artists of the sixties and early seventies of George Kubler’s writings on Meso-American cultures (an author whom Mackenzie, however, did not reference), see Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 221-223, 225, 227.

42 Robin Mackenzie, notecards, 1973, reproduced in Bodolai, “Borderlines,” 75.

206 scene traversed by an embodied subject, with an insistence upon the images’ construction of changing distances and angles between viewer and scenery.43

However, I now adopt an alternate perspective by arguing that the walking viewer’s on- site encounter with 1,2,3,4 marks an important chapter in what Rosalind Krauss has presented as the preeminence of spatiotemporal “passage” in earthworks and outdoor sculptures of the late

1960s and early 1970s. Krauss identified instances of extended traversals through space in the art of Smithson, Morris, Serra, and Bruce Nauman.44 The notion of “passage” clarifies Mackenzie’s construction of a site as an extended process of bodily movement. 1,2,3,4 calls for passages in the form of variable circuits traced and retraced on foot around stones with a possible additional excursion from shore to water. Pacing subjects in mid-“passage” engage in more immediate, extended, embodied journeys through sites than motorists “passing by” the NETCo roadside.

Meanwhile, the image of a passage as a corridor, conduit, or spatial linkage aptly captures both the serial viewing of the site and the serial structure of 1,2,3,4. Examining artworks and critics’ field-reports from this era reveals complementary examples of passage-like trails of stones and earth, often in water; such works emphasize the interplay of walking and fluctuating sightlines.

Critic Lawrence Alloway, in a 1976 Artforum field-report entitled “Site Inspection,” cited

Smithson’s Amarillo Ramp (1973) on Tecowas Creek, Texas, as “a viewing platform, directing attention back on the landscape” from the vantage point of a beholder ascending a sloping runway of red sandstone shale in the shape of an incomplete circle.45 In a comment on

43 On the suggestion of bodily motion in the artist’s landscape photographs, see, for example, Woodward, New Possibilities, n.p.; Karson, Silence and Slow Time,16; Perrin, “The Sense of Site,” 5,8.

44 Rosalind Krauss, “The Double Negative: A New Syntax for Sculpture,” in Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Viking Press, 1977), 282-283. For a synopsis of the subject of walking in outdoor contemporary art, see John Beardsley, “The Ramble,” in Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Landscape, 3rd ed. (New York: Abbeville Press, 1998), 40-57, and Garraud, L’idée de nature, 22-31.

45 Lawrence Alloway, “Site Inspection,” Artforum 15 (October 1976): 54. 207

Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) also applicable to Mackenzie’s 1,2,3,4, Krauss singled out “the experience of a moment-to-moment passage through space and time” in the viewer’s epic foray across heaped basalt stones and dirt forming a straight peninsula gradually curling inward on

Great Salt Lake, Utah [figure 36].46

In Canada, Mackenzie’s invention of a site experienced through bodily passage across stones reverberated with countryman Bill Vazan’s works. The two artists were aware of each other’s art during the 1970s as both had occasionally contributed works to the same events and were featured simultaneously in Canadian art reviews.47 Vazan beckoned viewers to indulge in a stroll through the winding, oscillating paths laid out by his Stone Maze (1976) or to clamber onto any of its 225 giant limestone boulders [figure 37].48 This labyrinthine work was installed on a

Montreal traffic island during the city’s hosting of the Summer Olympics. Although both

Mackenzie and Vazan highlight fluid viewing, Stone Maze is distinct for its balancing of bustling movement, deceleration, and rest. While the boulders anchor the site through points of stasis, visitors traipsing about or lolling on nearby benches animate the grassy isle. In contrast with

Mackenzie’s affiliation of stony sites with rigorous exertion, Vazan’s notes vaunt the maze as a ludic haven for bodily repose and recreation: “an island refuge from city traffic; being a rock garden; a social meeting centre; a maze for ritual/game.” 49 Unlike the 1,2,3,4 site which melts

46 Krauss, “The Double Negative,” 282.

47 Mackenzie and Vazan contributed artworks to the Changing Visions travelling exhibition of Canadian landscape art of 1976 and to art projects for the Summer Olympics held in Montreal that year. In 1974, works by both artists appeared in Joe Bodolai’s article on cartographic themes in Canadian contemporary art previously discussed in this chapter. Thus far, I have not found written correspondence between the two artists to confirm a personal acquaintance.

48 For a discussion of slowness, duration, and politics in relation to Stone Maze, see Tai van Toorn, “Urban Temporalities and Land Art: Bill Vazan’s Stone Maze” (guest lecture, “Landscape and Representation” seminar, McGill University, Montreal, QC, February 10, 2006).

49 Bill Vazan, “Stone Maze” (no date), in Bill Vazan: Suites photographiques recentes et oeuvres sur le terrain (Montreal: Ministère des affaires culturelles, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 1981), 51. In the same 208 mysteriously into its surroundings, Vazan’s passage is nestled concentrically within an ever- visible and audible urban panorama of rushing vehicles. Akin to a Neolithic monolith, the insular installation also reaches out to distant celestial views choreographed by slower, astronomical cycles. Four large rocks on the perimetre orient viewers to positions on the horizon at which the sun rises and sets during the solstices.50 Stone Maze elaborates upon a spatial schema of an earlier work, Bridge (1968-1972), for which Vazan set down a passage in water evocative of the fourth stage of 1,2,3,4. He placed narrow pieces of Masonite, painted in acrylic, in a rough circle on stones littering a quarry lake [figure 38]. Vazan and Mackenzie shape semi-insular sites with permeable boundaries on the verge of liquefaction to be navigated by viewers in transit. Vazan’s flimsy bridge is akin to a dotted line marking out an absurd, unending trajectory while the paths of his maze, in looping around an elusive centre, heighten awareness of the simultaneity of multiple registers of lived time. Mackenzie’s barely visible rope in the fourth stage draws a tenuous suggestion of a passage at the interface of water, stone, and air, the liminal zone at which the site shades into a broader space.

The Loch Awe viewfinder and other contemporaneous passages of stone, earth, and even

Masonite represent non-linear variations of minimalist sculptor Carl Andre’s idea of sculpture as a thoroughfare for the body. In 1970, Andre proposed the following explanation:

My idea of a piece of sculpture is a road. . . . But we don’t have a single point of view for a road at all, except a moving one, moving along it. . . . I think sculpture should have an infinite point of view. There should be no one place nor even a group of places where you should be. No single-point vistas or even several-point vistas.51 exhibition catalogue, see the following comments regarding the viewer’s bodily experience of Vazan’s land works and his general interest in kinesthesia: Paul Heyer, “Cosmography in a New Context,” 32; Lise Lamarche, “Sans titre,” 15.

50 See Bill Vazan’s preparatory diagrams of Stone Maze from 1975 in Bill Vazan (Paris: Centre culturel canadien, 1976), 10.

51 Carl Andre, “Sculpture is a Road” (1970), in Cuts: Texts 1959-2004, ed. James Meyer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 259. 209

Andre’s multi-perspectival road-art fuses aspects of NETCo’s and Wall’s cinematic roadside views, Ellis’s irresolvable Perspective Construction, Smithson’s “open landscape,” and Krauss’s spatiotemporal “passage.” In 1,2,3,4, Mackenzie foregrounded Andre’s emphasis on the implicitly anti-authoritarian, unconstrained mobility of embodied visual experience. Mackenzie built a road-like sculpture of interlaced trails of stones and stretches of string inspiring improvised trajectories through an infinite spectrum of viewpoints.

The physical outlines marked by the viewfinder and the ephemeral paths tramped by viewers are also akin to textual passages inscribed across the site. The correspondence of the points and lines of Mackenzie’s work to punctuation marks such as periods, colons, hyphens, and dashes reveals the site as an unfolding text. This site’s syntactical flow is regulated by stops, caesuras, and moments of anticipation. Rhythms of written language overlap those of music as the work’s title also implies the counting out of a metronomic beat.52 1,2,3,4 merges the gestural quality and temporality of inscription, reading, embodied serial viewing, and even choreography.

By the fourth stage, the site transmogrifies into a run-on sentence or unstructured melody without closure. Mackenzie’s site interpreted as text should therefore be distinguished from the following site-specific, artistic strategies integrating text: writings physically embedded in sites

(such as Ben Vautier’s 1961 Terrain vague series of hand-lettered placards, the road signs in

NETCo’s 1969 Quarter-Mile series, Nancy Holt’s California Sun Signs series of 1972, Carole

Condé and Karl Beveridge’s Cultural Signs series in urban spaces of 1975, Ian Hamilton

Finlay’s carved inscriptions on outdoor sculptures and furniture, and Marlene Creates’s

Language and Land Use series of the early 1990s); the use of writing to record or comment on

52 Throughout his article, “The Sense of Site,” Perrin developed numerous analogies between music and the sequencing of Mackenzie’s photographs from the mid- to late 1970s; he did not, however, discuss either 1,2,3,4 or the artist’s sculptural or land works. 210 outdoor walks (exemplified by Richard Long and Hamish Fulton); the juxtaposing of text with landscape photography (in the works of Willie Doherty); and the use of figurative language to interpret physical features of sites (as in Ellis’s Landscape as Metaphor).53

The syntactical and typographical features of the 1,2,3,4 viewfinder coordinate an embodied viewing experience across multiple sightlines in the vein of the shifting paths of vision structured by English landscape gardener and architect Lancelot “Capability” Brown (1716-

1783). Brown articulated his design precepts for mobile viewing in a distinctively grammatical philosophy of the corporeal, durational experience of large-scale, cultivated gardens. Brown employed punctuation analogies to illustrate his method of laying out garden plans designed to guide eye and body movements: the twists and turns in a stroll become a chain of sentences and clauses with distinct rhythms and spacing. The following statements made by Brown in conversation at Hampton Court were recorded by religious author Hannah More in a letter of

1782: “‘Now there,’ said he, pointing his finger, ‘I make a comma, and there,’ . . . ‘where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon; at another spot, where an interruption is desirable to break the view, a parenthesis; now a full stop, and then I begin another subject.’”54 Filtered by the lens of Brown’s literary landscaping, the site of Mackenzie’s viewfinder grows through open-ended lines or poetic verses read and tread by the beholder. Brown’s comment illuminates Mackenzie’s site as a dynamic textual passage and the subject chronicled by that passage. 1,2,3,4 thus shares with NETCo’s Quarter-Mile a narrative-like unfurling of sites. Through the intervention of the body, 1,2,3,4 spins tales of the genesis and vanishing of its site.

53 For a sampling of artists creating written texts in European outdoor locations, see Colette Garraud and Mickey Boël, L’artiste contemporain et la nature: parcs et paysages européens (Paris: Hazan, 2007), 180-187.

54 Hannah More to her sisters, December 1782, in William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper & Bros., 1835), 1: 267 quoted in Peter Willis, “Capability Brown in Northumberland,” Garden History 9 (Autumn 1981): 180 [modern punctuation added by Willis]. 211

Mackenzie’s viewfinder delineates a grammatical view affiliated with other syntactical sites conceived of by artists for mobile beholders during the 1960s and 1970s. Key artists and authors likened sites to textual passages in which syntactic relations are shaped by visual and mobile experience. The earliest significant grammatical view occurs in Tony Smith’s 1966 recollection of his drive on the New Jersey Turnpike (discussed in Chapter Two). Smith noted that the “dark pavement” was “punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes, and colored [sic] lights.”55

His wording paints roadside landmarks as animating, interrupting, and organizing the moving view of a black road construed as an inky scrawling of mysterious content. Smithson, struck by

Smith’s punctuated road, correlated linguistics with topography and geometry by declaring that

“Points, lines, areas, or volumes establish the syntax of sites.”56 While Smith drew attention to the power of roadside “punctuation” to partition, measure, and diversify the perceptual flow of serial vision (defined in Chapter Two), Smithson evoked syntax to elaborate upon the relationships amongst the internal features and external boundaries of a site as visually codified on a map. Smithson’s enumeration further suggests the geometric expansion of a site through stages from mere point to full volume and thus recalls the development of Mackenzie’s 1,2,3,4.

A grammatical metaphor for site also crops up in Krauss’s reading of the body’s visual and spatiotemporal experience of the passages of earthworks and outdoor sculptures as manifest in the title of her chapter, “The Double Negative: A New Syntax for Sculpture.”

To these readings of modern and postmodern sculpture, Canadian artists and writers added an emphasis on the intertwined visual and kinaesthetic experiences of navigating syntactical sites. Examining an early shoreline land work by Vazan offers clarification. This

55 Smith, “Talking with Tony Smith,” 19.

56 Robert Smithson, “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site,” Artforum (June 1967); reprinted in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 55. On language in Smithson’s oeuvre, see Craig Owens, “Earthwords,” October 10 (Autumn 1979): 120-130. 212 work anticipated 1,2,3,4 by employing walking to inscribe and visually scan a site envisioned by the artist as a textual passage within typographical marks. On August 13, 1969, Vazan traced a long, curved line at low tide in the red sand of Paul’s Bluff, PEI. Simultaneously, BC photo- conceptual artist Ian Wallace etched a similar arc in the gray sand of Vancouver’s Spanish

Banks. In a letter to his collaborator, Vazan requested that Wallace use a branch to carve a shallow furrow ideally longer than six hundred feet.57 Vazan later recalled that the crescents were drawn “[w]hile both of us faced inland.”58 The resulting work was entitled Canada in

Parentheses [figure 39], a pair of reverse or approximate mirror images of a trodden passage.

The artists indirectly gazed at each other across a known, yet neither immediately nor wholly perceptible, vastness. As suggested by the title, the artists’ bodily trajectories temporarily suspend or bracket the country as a monumental explanatory word, supplementary clause, or linguistic excess between two proverbial lines drawn in the sand.

The comparison of Vazan’s grammatical operations with Mackenzie’s passage elucidates the types of site-specific, embodied viewing particular to each artist. Vazan’s absurd, ephemeral brackets tenuously mark off and suspend the country reimagined as a fragmented phrase isolated within a sentence or text. In visually fixing two outer points on a land mass, the parentheses also establish a pair of viewing thresholds or boundaries from which Vazan and Wallace turned inland to gaze virtually at one another across their immediate surroundings. In contrast,

Mackenzie’s site, rather than resembling an isolated, fixed clause, is more analogous to a sentence replete with dynamic verbs interspersed with transitions and pauses: the work’s four

57 Bill Vazan to Ian Wallace, July 11, 1969, in Claudine Roger, “Selective Bio-bibliography,” in Bill Vazan: Walking into the Vanishing Point (Montreal: Vox, Centre de l’image contemporaine, 2009), 185.

58 Paul Heyer and William Vazan, “Conceptual Art: Transformation of Natural and of Cultural Environments,” Leonardo 7 (1974): 204.

213 stages of growth manifest visible physical transformations, shifting outlines, and a striking relocation from land to water. For the viewer, the viewfinder’s implicit verb-like quality translates into a kinetic beholding experience with frequent changes of position and posture to inspect the site’s mutations across many sightlines. The beholder’s movements around the viewfinder further create the visual effect of the site altering and moving.

This intertwining of visible change, movement, and grammatical metaphor recurs in writings by Canadian critics who deemed Mackenzie’s on-site and landscape-themed works as action-based, linguistic expositions of embodied, mobile art-making and viewing. Walter Klepac wrote in 1971 that “If we can speak in terms of a grammar of art we could say that Robin

Mackenzie conceives of art more as a verb than as a noun.”59 The critic referred to the prevalence of themes in the artist’s work interpretable as verbs indicative of somatic performance, as in the artist’s physically demanding working methods and the walking viewer’s interactions with the artworks. The implicit presence of temporal verbs also struck Klepac who noted Mackenzie’s fascination with organic processes of germination, growth, and decay, as well as his attunement to the physical alterations of his artworks over extended periods of time. Six years later, Peter Perrin revisited these grammatical operations in an article on Mackenzie in

Artscanada. He was especially intrigued by the prominence of repetition in Mackenzie’s photographs, such as multiple viewings of the same scene from different bodily positions and angles. For Perrin, the artist managed to capture reiterated embodied experiences of sites in grids of still images evocative of “a table of components in a grammar of landscape—a conjugation.”60

Both critics framed Mackenzie’s art as privileging the temporality of the artist’s and the viewer’s

59 Walter Klepac, “The Subversions of Art 1,” Guerilla 2:19, October 20, 1971, 17. Krauss conceived of Richard Serra’s works as approximations of transitive verbs and Carl Andre’s sculptures as having the effect of intransitive verbs; see Krauss, “The Double Negative,” 275-276.

60 Perrin, “The Sense of Site,” 5. 214 bodily movements, the duration of beholding, and the visible changes evident in the organic matter in his art. While concurring with Klepac and Perrin, I further affirm that in the viewfinder of 1,2,3,4, Mackenzie extended this interest in the bodily and material manifestations of temporal passage to the visual appearance of the site itself. This artwork generates a suite of views existing through actions, transformations, and, in the artist’s apt term, “temporary conditions.”

Tangled Triangulations

In guiding the viewer through a series of locations, angles of vision, and measured distances, the Loch Awe viewfinder initiates a quasi-geographical surveying expedition.

However, unlike the surveyor’s task of measuring and determining the boundaries of a site to produce a scientifically accurate, complete map, Mackenzie’s stone-and-string viewfinder charts an indeterminate, evolving site. The artist’s innovative adaptation of surveying techniques and concepts to create his viewfinder is the subject of this section. In particular, I examine 1,2,3,4 and its fluctuating site to examine the artist’s political response to the role of surveying in

Canadian history. This section further situates Mackenzie’s elaboration of a subversive anti- surveying in his activism during the 1970s.

The cords and stones of the 1,2,3,4 viewfinder, along with the artist’s working methods, allude to surveying. Surveying techniques, terms, tools, and viewing practices recur in the production of the artwork, Mackenzie’s accompanying notes, and his documentary photographs.

In constructing 1,2,3,4, the artist drew inspiration from his former employment in a surveying crew.61 He consistently used sixty-one metres of twine to link the stones in a reenactment of professional surveyors’ use of metal chains, steel tapes, or lengths of fabric of fixed units to measure distances on land. The artwork’s dark stones, by marking distances and plotting angles,

61 Bodolai briefly mentioned Mackenzie’s previous surveying experience without expanding in detail on the specific references to surveying made by 1,2,3,4. See Bodolai, “Borderlines,” 75.

215 echo the role of surveyors’ stone cairns, pillars, signs, and other objects planted at triangulation stations. Following the view from one Mackenzie stone down the sightline created by the string to a distant stone, the viewer performs a gesture evoking the surveyor’s observation of a site from a triangulation point, perhaps while gazing through the telescope of a theodolite to measure angles. In his notes, Mackenzie notably dubbed the third stage of the work “triangulations” in reference to a basic method in surveying. However, whereas standard triangulation provides a mathematically calculated network of fixed points on which to base a reliable map, Mackenzie’s notes posit more free-form, embodied “triangulations” as the basis of the amorphous “sites” of

1,2,3,4 comprised of transforming points and sightlines. Meanwhile, the photographs of the final stage of the work in the waters of Loch Awe uncannily resemble an iconic documentary photograph of rocks in water from the history of modern scientific surveying expeditions in

North America: Tufa Domes, Pyramid Lake, Nevada (King Survey) taken around 1867 by

Timothy H. O’Sullivan (1840-1882) during the Geological Explorations of the Fortieth Parallel led by geologist Clarence King in the American southwest (1867-1870; 1872) [figures 40, 41].

Mackenzie’s scene of otherworldly, floating stones evokes O’Sullivan’s equally atmospheric capturing of a chain of formidable masses rising from the smooth surface of water.62

During the era of 1,2,3,4’s creation, numerous artists availed themselves of the concepts, practices, and instruments of surveying to inventively reconnoitre sites. This appropriation of surveying is most evident in the works of artists intervening in or representing outdoor locales, a phenomenon thus far seldom explored by scholars who have instead privileged mapping

62 In vocabulary recalling Clement Greenberg’s remarks on Canadian hallucinatory landscapes mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Rosalind Krauss emphasized the dream-like quality of Tufa Domes as a view “hypnotically seen” and imbued with a “hallucinatory wealth of detail.” See Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces,” 313, 311. She discusses O’Sullivan’s photographs as comprising a distinctly 19th-century category of photographic “views” associated with the popularity of stereoscopes and the goals of science (ibid., 311-315). For a discussion of O’Sullivan’s participation in geological and geographical surveys, as well as the role of his work in scientific inquiries into the unknown, see Joel Snyder, “Territorial Photography,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 175-201. 216 practices and geographical imagery by artists.63 A cursory scan reveals the diversity of artists’ surveying practices amongst Mackenzie’s contemporaries. London, Ontario-based artist Greg

Curnoe created a rich body of landscape paintings, diagrams, and maps inspired by his previous experience on a surveying team as well as by the specialized atlases and surveying equipment prominently displayed in his studio.64 The members of NETCo prepared for their Quarter-Mile

N.E. Thing Co. Landscapes of 1969 by contracting surveyors to measure and document the selected areas.65 Vancouver artist Glenn Lewis, in two filmed performances of 1969 entitled Blue

Tape around a City Block and Forest Industry, gridded city streets and forest with surveyor’s tape.66 Richard Long layered Ordnance Survey maps with diagrams and aerial photographs in the documentation of his walks in the British Isles.67 The surveyor’s science also assisted in the planning of large-scale earthworks. Lawrence Alloway observed that surveying, construction, engineering, and “an ethic” of physical labour were essential to the execution of such works and

63 On mapping themes and practices in 20th-century art, see the following: Gilles A. Tiberghien, “Maps and Inscriptions,” in Land Art, trans. Caroline Green (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995), 163-195; Denis Cosgrove, “Cultural Cartography: Maps and Mapping in Cultural Geography,” Annales de géographie 660-661 (2008): 171-177; Edward S. Casey, “Mapping the Earth in Works of Art,” in Rethinking Nature: Essays in Environmental Philosophy, eds. Bruce V. Foltz and Robert Frodeman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 260-269; Edward S. Casey, Earth-Mapping: Artists Reshaping Landscape (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Also see Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 2000).

64 Bodolai, “Borderlines,” 73.

65 NETCo referenced the “chief surveyor” on the road map of Prince Edward Island, Prince Edward Island Travel Bureau, Charlottetown, 1969, Unit General – 5, 1969, Box 10, File 2, Iain Baxter Fonds CA OTAG SC064, E.P. Taylor Research Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. For the 1969 Newport Harbor, California, version of the Quarter-Mile, Iain Baxter had the plot of land surveyed to determine its precise centre and outer limits. See Newport Harbor Art Museum press release, “‘New Art of Vancouver’ Exhibition Includes Work by Iain Baxter, President of N.E. Thing Co., Ltd. on Ten Acre Newport Center Land,” October 9, 1969, N.E. Thing Co. Artist File, 1965-1975, Vancouver Art Gallery Library and Archives.

66 Arnold, “Reference/Cross Reference,” 97.

67 Stephen Bann, “The Map as Index of the Real: Land Art and the Authentication of Travel,” Imago Mundi 46 (1994): 16. 217 molded the hardy frontier ethos cultivated by certain artists.68 As of the 1970s, Nancy Holt has overseen the detailed surveying, planning, and construction of her earthworks and public art projects.69 Whereas the preceding artists integrated surveying into art, Smithson detected art in surveying. In his article “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site” (1967), he mused that “Land surveying and preliminary building, if isolated into discrete stages, may be viewed as an array of art works that vanish as they develop.”70 For instance, the artist interpreted incomplete, and therefore non-utilitarian, dam construction sites as “abstract” art whose aesthetic value would be lost upon the completion of construction.71

Amidst these international artistic tendencies, Mackenzie’s viewfinder is additionally significant in the context of the nationalist values attributed to surveying in Centennial-era

Canada. 1,2,3,4, although made in Scotland, attests to Canadian preoccupations with viewing, measuring, and laying claim to sites. Published to commemorate the nation’s centenary, books on the history of surveying (intended for a general readership), such as the three-volume Men and Meridians (1966; 1967; 1969) and Surveyors of Canada 1867-1967 (1966), celebrated surveying as a source of national pride. Officially sanctioned history books paid tribute to 19th- century surveyors who, braving harsh climates, wilderness, and mountains, played a decisive role in the political consolidation of, and amplification of knowledge about, the nascent nation. In the foreword to Surveyors of Canada, E. L. M. Burns praised the unique contributions of surveyors to national heritage, adding that mental images of the country were inextricable from the maps

68 Alloway, “Site Inspection,” 51.

69 Nancy Holt, “Interview with Nancy Holt,” interview by James Meyer, in Nancy Holt: Sightlines, 229.

70 Smithson, “Air Terminal Site,” 58.

71 Ibid., 53, 55.

218 produced by surveying throughout colonization and expansion.72 Historians and surveyors also lauded the discipline’s promising hi-tech future. As of the Second World War, the technological sophistication of surveying in Canada had grown. By the late sixties, surveying incorporated radar, aircraft, satellites, electronics, computers, and photogrammetry.73

Surveying from the 1870s provides a clarifying counterpart to the viewfinder’s anti- surveying of a century later. During expeditions across Canada in the 1870s, surveyors erected

“monuments” foreshadowing the forms of land works or earthworks built in the 1970s. As yet, this noteworthy correlation has eluded significant art historical commentary. These monuments include stone cairns built at triangulation stations and large, conical mounds of earth, each in a circular trench, along national boundaries [figures 42-44]. From 1872 to 1874, British and

American surveyors marked out the Canada-US border along part of the forty-ninth parallel with a trail (or passage) of 388 monuments. In the same decade, cairns, earth mounds, and sod- covered pyramids surrounded by square pits were built to mark the location of townships in the

Prairies and parts of British Columbia according to the Dominion Lands survey system [figure

45].74 Even the upright wooden markers installed at triangulation stations anticipate the structure of Ellis’s Perspective Construction and its function as a guide to visual and spatial orientation

[figure 46]. While striking and under-recognized formal similarities exist between surveyors’ monuments and some land art, this is neither to say that Mackenzie and other artists intentionally

72 E.L.M. Burns, foreword to Surveyors of Canada 1867-1967, by Courtney C.J. Bond (Ottawa: The Canadian Institute of Surveying, 1966), vii.

73 On technology in Canadian surveying of the 1960s, see the following: Don W. Thomson, Men and Meridians: The History of Surveying and Mapping in Canada, vol. 3, 1917 to 1947 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer for Canada, 1969), 32; Courtney C.J. Bond, Surveyors of Canada 1867-1967 (Ottawa: The Canadian Institute of Surveying, 1966), 142; Gerald McGrath, “Retrospect and Prospects,” in Mapping a Northern Land: The Survey of Canada, 1947-1994, ed. Gerald McGrath and Louis M. Sebert (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999), 574.

74 Surveyors also left monuments in the form of iron posts and forest areas cleared to offer unimpeded vistas. See Bond, Surveyors of Canada, 6, 8, 22, 120-121.

219 replicated earlier structures nor that the growth of 1,2,3,4 is a nationalistic tribute to the history of the systematic charting of the country. Rather, the historical monuments subtly counterpoint

Mackenzie’s redefining of sight and site in a Canada steeped in post-centennial nationalism yet perturbed by its colonialist past.

Although both monuments and viewfinder bring a site into view by orienting sightlines and plotting locations, the Loch Awe work is an anti-surveying monument on account of its location and the type of sites that it delineates. 1,2,3,4 reverses the typical narrative of the explorer mapping the New World. Mackenzie left his Canadian homeland to chart a site across the Atlantic during his residency as guest artist at the Edinburgh Festival.75 Distinct from the colonial surveyor’s foray into terra incognita, Mackenzie’s destination was an established tourist attraction steeped in history and legend. This dramatic setting drew artists inspired by picturesque and sublime landscape aesthetics in the early 19th century. J. M. W. Turner made a pencil drawing of Kilchurn Castle on Loch Awe (1801) [figure 47], while William Wordsworth immortalized the site in his poem, “Address to Kilchurn Castle upon Loch Awe” (1803).76

Mackenzie’s Scottish sojourn also signaled a personal return to, and rediscovery of, his ancestral homeland. (Although the artist did not explicitly associate 1,2,3,4 with his own heritage, Scottish places and cultural references recur in his art.)77

75 In his “Chronology” or artist’s resume, Mackenzie noted his participation from July 28 to September 6, 1973 in the Edinburgh Festival as a guest artist and visiting lecturer sponsored by the Richard de Marco Gallery, the Scottish Arts Council, and the Canada Council. See Robin Mackenzie, Chronology, undated, 12, Mackenzie, Robin 1938– Doc/Ca, Library and Archives of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

76 On Turner’s sketch of Loch Awe as an affirmation of the sublime, see John Gage, “Turner and the Picturesque—II,” The Burlington Magazine 107 (February 1965): 76. Wordsworth’s poem is from Memorials of a Tour in Scotland (1803).

77 In addition to 1,2,3,4, Mackenzie completed an unnamed work in Loch Awe to explore the manipulation of sightlines. For a description (without accompanying illustrations) of this second work, see Bodolai, “Borderlines in Art and Experience,” 75. The artist’s return to Scotland in 1975 yielded some of his best-known photographic series, including Untitled Memory Piece (1975-76). In 1983, Mackenzie contributed a sound work, Bagpipes, Voices, and Ocean, to a “sound symposium” in St. John’s, Newfoundland. He raised Aberdeen Angus cattle and later Scottish 220

Mackenzie’s viewfinder not only inverts the colonialist aims of the Confederation-era surveying monuments by staking out an Old World setting but also flouts the visual and political functions of the 19th-century monuments. The stones of 1,2,3,4, in distinction from surveyors’ cairns and earth mounds, triangulate highly mutable, ephemeral sites evading systematic, standardized mapping. Unlike the surveyors’ conical boundary mounds functioning as fixed nodes from which to make reliable visual measurements, Mackenzie enacted an anti-surveying strategy by selecting stone markers of varied sizes located at different, random distances from each other. Around these markers the artist traced malleable, and occasionally, nearly invisible, networks of string suggestive of porous boundaries around unfinished, even vanishing, sites.

Through the shifting outlines and manifold sightlines proffered for exploration, the viewfinder reveals sites not conducive to definitive identification, measurement, or mapping. In stark contrast with a surveying expedition organized by a government body or research institute,

Mackenzie’s viewfinder does not direct the viewer to gather sound, utilitarian, economic, scientific, or military information. Rather, 1,2,3,4 inspires the walker’s private experience of subtle visual confusion through an open-ended passage. The work replaces the grand narrative of a modern nation’s birth with the erratic developments and dissolutions of a site.

By overturning the aims and methods of surveying in the 1,2,3,4 viewfinder, the artist mounts an implicit critique of conventional surveying as an optical discipline of colonialism.

1,2,3,4 aligns with a growing body of geographical and historical analyses of surveying and mapping as ideological ventures complicit with the imposition of colonialist power through conquest and dispossession. Such work uncovers and dismantles what historian of cartography

J.B. Harley referred to as the legally sanctioned, elitist “space discipline” implicit in the borders,

Highland cattle on his farm. On his sound art and farming, see Bob Langmaid, “Farmer-artist Inspired by His Herd of Cattle,” Toronto Star, October 22, 1985, ES12.

221 subdivisions, and visual content of maps.78 This research catenates with publications on colonial landscape imagery and colonialist visuality by art historians Marcia Crosby, W.J.T. Mitchell, and

Allan Wallach, cultural studies scholar Jonathan Bordo, and geographer Bruce Braun. These authors share an interest in the power relations underpinning the Western subject’s visual and political subjugation of places and aboriginal peoples.79 Yet, as cultural geographer Denis

Cosgrove noted, colonized peoples have responded by appropriating surveying, maps, and landscape imagery to resist imperial spatial discipline, as in the case of land claims.80

Mackenzie’s work acknowledges both the repressive and critical potential of surveying.

In generating a view defying institutionalized surveying, 1,2,3,4 is a ramification of the artist’s activism in Canada in the 1970s. Mackenzie repeatedly spoke out against the effects of ill-managed, unethical government and corporate appropriation of Canadian outdoor sites. The artist endeavoured to defend the integrity, way of life, and histories of rural and native communities. By surveying an enigmatic site in his Loch Awe work, Mackenzie created a location defying the laws of state ownership, expropriation, dispossession, and eviction. The artwork’s emphasis on the site’s visibly mutable, ephemeral qualities also intersects with the artist’s advocating for the conservation of fragile, endangered sites. As the following examples

78 J.B. Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” in The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 285.

79 See the following: Marcia Crosby, “Construction of the Imaginary Indian,” in Vancouver Anthology: The Institutional Politics of Art, ed. Stan Douglas (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1991), 266-291; W.J.T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 5-34; Allan Wallach, “Between Subject and Object,” in Landscape Theory, ed. Rachael Ziady DeLue and James Elkins (London: Routledge, 2008), 315-321; Jonathan Bordo, “Jack Pine—Wilderness Sublime or the Erasure of the Aboriginal Presence from the Landscape,” Journal of Canadian Studies 27 (Winter 1992): 98-128; Bruce Braun, “BC Seeing/Seeing BC: Vision and Visuality on Canada’s West Coast,” in The Intemperate Rainforest: Nature, Culture, and Power on Canada’s West Coast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 156-212.

80 Cosgrove, “Cultural Cartography,” 166-167. Denis Cosgrove offers an insightful, concise discussion of mapping and visual representation of colonized, hybrid, “other” spaces in “Landscape and the European Sense of Sight—Eyeing Nature,” in Handbook of Cultural Geography, ed. Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh, Steve Pile, and Nigel Thrift (London: Sage, 2003), 265. 222 reveal, Mackenzie aimed to contest institutional interference in the well-being of local sites rather than to prevent sites from changing with the times. In 1976, Mackenzie, along with artists

Reinhard Reitzenstein, Murray Favro, Jack Chambers, Greg Curnoe, Joyce Wieland, and

Michael Snow, demanded the withdrawal of their works from the 1976 Changing Visions exhibition of Canadian landscape art (1,2,3,4 was among these works). This demand came in protest against the disposal of mercury into Ontario’s English-Wabigoon River System, adjacent to native reservations, by the exhibition’s corporate sponsor, the Reed Paper Company.

Mackenzie vociferously denounced what many artists perceived as Reed’s hypocritical appropriation of landscape art in a propagandistic spectacle distracting the public from the deleterious toll on the environment and human lives.81 Mackenzie’s ecological activism was rooted in his work as a forest conservationist dedicated to planting trees in a designated area on his farm in which he also created in situ artworks.82 Mackenzie’s farm (where he had also lived during childhood) and his 19th-century stone house are also reminders of his advocacy for the protection of historical rural communities. In 1972, he published a piece in Artscanada under the polemical title, “No Reserves for the New Indians,” to raise national awareness about the controversial decision of the federal and Ontario governments to expropriate agricultural land in and around Pickering for a new international airport and satellite town to be named Cedarwood.

The airport proposal called for the eviction of residents and even the eradication of the village of

81 Walter Klepac, “The Art of Dissent,” The Canadian Forum 56, March 1977, 5; this article, as preserved in Reitzenstein, Reinhard 1949—Doc/Ca, Library and Archives of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, lacks complete page numbers. Klepac’s article cites artists’ statements about this controversial exhibition and includes reproductions of letters written and signed by Mackenzie, Favro, Reitzenstein, and Carmen Lamanna to denounce Reed Paper’s activities. Klepac added that certain private owners refused artists’ demands for the removal of their artworks from the exhibition.

82 Chandler, “The Artist in the Landscape,” 35. 223

Brougham.83 Mackenzie’s article cited local residents’ negative responses to the project and announced public meetings to contest the government’s plans. The artist underscored the historical heritage of this threatened region by including photographs of a view of his property and the nearby birthplace of Tom Thomson. Mackenzie claimed a local historical precedent for urgent community resistance by reproducing in his article several calls for Reform Party radical meetings during the Upper Canada Rebellions of 1837 led by Scottish-born William Lyon

Mackenzie (1795-1861), first mayor of Toronto (and possible ancestor of the artist).84

In the context of the artist’s activism, 1,2,3,4 evokes an idealist site whose mutability and mobility are amenable neither to permanent colonization nor expropriation. The work is thus a more political homologue of NETCo’s overturning of the commodification of window scenery by advertising unobtainable, impalpable, visual real estate (or rather, unreal estate). Not simply a utopian fantasy, Mackenzie’s 1,2,3,4 productively unsettles the power relations between viewer and view, a strategy akin to that adopted by Ellis with Perspective Construction for the Salish.

The mutability of Mackenzie’s site and the mobile anti-surveying encouraged by his viewfinder induce beholders to relinquish their assumption of visual certainty.

Contested Loci

As both the third and fourth chapters pursue complementary arguments regarding the viewfinder, this section extricates the commonalities between Ellis and Mackenzie to shed

83 Robin Mackenzie, “No Reserves for the New Indians Part One: Documents, March 2, 1972,” Artscanada 29 (February/March 1972): 75. On the Pickering airport, also see Mack Parliament, “Speculators Send Pickering Land Prices Soaring,” Toronto Star, March 3, 1972, 8; Al Barnes, “Doomed Village of Brougham is Fighting Back,” Toronto Star, March 3, 1972, 8; Stanley L. Warner, “Balanced Information: The Pickering Airport Experiment,” The Review of Economics and Statistics 63 (May 1981): 256-262.

84 Mackenzie, “No Reserves,” 75. During the spring 2011 Canadian federal elections, members of parliament and local communities revived debates surrounding the as yet undecided future of this tract of Ontarian farmland; community members expressed apprehension of the Conservative government’s possible interest in building the airport and satellite city. See Richard J. Brennan, “Critics Fear Conservatives will Give Pickering Airport Wings,” Toronto Star, April 26, 2011, http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/article/980636--critics-fear- conservatives-will-give-pickering-airport-wings. 224 further light upon their contributions to conceptions of sight and site in Canadian land art.

Firstly, the two artists’ works resonate in their formal and aesthetic similarities. These individuals form a logical pairing due to their complementary artistic strategies and preferences for incorporating found, local materials and water in outdoor works which they documented in photographs. Both Ellis and Mackenzie elaborated their ideas about sight and site in detail through writings and interviews in contrast with NETCo’s penchant for condensing ideas into witty slogans, epigrams, and glossaries. In light of the absence of either accessible personal correspondence between them or documentation of their having exhibited together, the creative unison between the two artists appears to have derived more from a shared historical and artistic milieu than a direct friendship or acknowledged mutual influence.

Furthermore, Ellis and Mackenzie were in unison in their preference for creating artworks in the local settings in which they lived, worked, or vacationed. Their rootedness in regional sites diverges from NETCo’s mobile infiltration of infrastructures and popular transport linking places and people across Canada and North America. On account of this valorizing of the local, critics, curators, and Ellis and Mackenzie themselves have invoked similar (if not synonymous) terms to describe the artists’ works as embodying a “sense of site,” “place,” or “region.” Differing connotations notwithstanding, these concepts recur in 1970s readings of the artists’ attempts to reveal or manifest details of the appearance, beauty, meaning, ambiance, or past of local scenery in Canada.85 Columnists and interviewers interpreted Ellis’s in situ interventions as “site- referenced art”86 engaging with the “specifics” and “history” of “place”87 to unveil a uniquely

85 John Brinckerhoff Jackson noted that the ambiguous “sense of place,” a term now ubiquitous in design, architecture, and real estate, originated in antiquity: genius loci designated a “guardian divinity,” a patron spirit dwelling in a particular place and worshipped by local inhabitants. This divinity supposedly endowed a place with its “unique quality.” See Brinckerhoff Jackson, A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 157.

86Wheeler, “Dean Ellis,” 23. 225

West Coast “sense of region”88 or “sense of place.” 89 In similar terms, curator Scott Watson in

1983 credited Ellis with uncovering “knowledge of place” through works exemplifying the

“passionately contextual” strategies of Vancouver-area artists of the period.90 The artist proclaimed the local as central to his art and daily life: Ellis praised his fellow Hornby Islanders as “living in their sense of region” and fostering a community which he found more inspiring than the mainstream art scene.91 Mackenzie likewise elucidated his own art as concentrating upon a “sense of site.”92 Critics saw in Mackenzie’s 1970s pieces the manifestations of the

“effects of arbitrary boundaries on our sense of place,”93 evidence of the artist’s inventive

“rediscovery of place”94 and disclosure of “properties intrinsic to the site.”95 In his article “The

Sense of Site” (1970), Perrin wrote that “Mackenzie has encountered the genius loci and made it a basis for his art in Ontario . . . .”96 The theme of the “sense of site” underpins this chapter’s argument. However, I emphasize that the artists’ works do not solely draw upon or expose particular settings but, more specifically, choreograph situations of visual bafflement in which the beholder grapples with the site’s meanings. The sites filtered through Mackenzie’s and Ellis’s viewfinders strategically elicit various forms of visual perplexity. Far from a pejorative term,

87 Ibid., 26.

88 Lowndes, “Two Artists,” n.p.

89 Ryan, “Dean Ellis,” n.p.

90 Watson, “Terminal City,” 232.

91 Lowndes, “Two Artists” (includes an interview with Ellis), n.p.

92 Karson, Silence and Slow Time (includes an interview with Mackenzie), 13.

93 Klepac, “The Subversions of Art 1,” 17.

94 Dale McConathy, “Reason over Passion,” Artscanada 32 (Autumn 1975): 80.

95 Karson, Silence and Slow Time, 14.

96 Perrin, “The Sense of Site,” 10. 226 such visual uncertainty is the precondition for critically viewing and reassessing assumptions concerning a site’s ontological status and its cultural, aesthetic, and political significance.

Consequently, these works reveal the convergence between the two artists’ conceptions of the beholder. Both viewfinders reached a varied public in the 1970s, ranging from the artists themselves, locals and tourists in British Columbia and Scotland, to gallery-goers and readers of exhibition catalogues and art journals. However, these works also addressed, and were inspired by, particular communities of politically engaged viewers invested in specific sites. Perspective

Construction for the Salish and 1, 2, 3, 4 extend their creators’ avowed propensity for local materials and settings by incorporating allusions to a heterogeneous body of subjects embroiled in regional conflicts in colonial and more recent Canadian history. The artists address these subjects as heirs to culturally established ways of viewing and appropriating sites and as potential catalysts for change. Ellis’s challenge to the spatial orders inherited from European art is intertwined with his affiliation with the anti-establishment, countercultural politics of the

Vancouver-area arts community, while the title and weir-like structure of his viewfinder address the Coast Salish and reveal Euro-Canadian anxieties and ambivalence towards British

Columbia’s colonialist past and ongoing tensions over land claims. Mackenzie’s delineation of an ever-changing, non-surveyable site resistant to exclusive ownership is inseparable from his alliance with anti-corporate, ecologically conscious Canadian artist-activists and anti- government, rural Ontarian protestors. In the wake of the celebratory, nationalist climate of the

1967 centennial, the viewfinders produce sites in transformation amidst multiple, regional affiliations, local conflicts, and resistance against authorities.

227

CHAPTER FOUR: FIGURES 33-47

Images were removed due to copyright restrictions.

228

Figure 36. Robert Smithson walking along the Spiral Jetty, Great Salt Lake, Utah, 1970. Photograph by Gianfranco Gorgoni. Reproduced in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, 281.

230

231

Figure 40. Robin Mackenzie, The Same Length of Line Connecting 1, 2, 3, 4 (detail), 1973-1974.

232

Figure 43. A conical mound in a circular trench on the 49th parallel along the Canada-United States border, 1872-1874. Reproduced in Bond, Surveyors of Canada, 8.

Figure 46. Surveyor Philip E. Palmer resting against a stone cairn at a triangulation station with a wooden marker, White Hill, Pictou, Nova Scotia, 1923. Reproduced in Bond, Surveyors of Canada, 56.

Figure 47. J.M.W. Turner, Kilchurn Castle on Loch Awe, circa 1801. Pencil on paper. 36.2 cm x 47.8 cm. British Museum, London. 234

CHAPTER 5. HIDDEN HABITATS: THE ARBOREAL APERTURES OF REINHARD REITZENSTEIN, 1975-1976

Sylvan Glades

In May 1976, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (in office 1968-79; 1980-84) delivered the opening address for HABITAT, the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements, held in

Vancouver. He evoked the tending of a tree or plant as a metaphor for attending to current global living conditions:

It is human nature to seek time to dwell on one’s difficulties, to expose their roots to the light of reason, to minutely examine the fruits of every possible solution. Unfortunately, we do not have the time. All we can do is to cut back the foliage, to prune and trim, to try to combat the persistent resurgence of custom and tradition.1

Although his emphasis was on the need for swift responses to pressing social and ecological issues, his botanical metaphor is striking for its illustration of relations between site and sight. In a planted site, such as a garden, orchard, vineyard, or backyard, there are two forms of horticultural maintenance representative of contrasting ways of negotiating with the visible— exposure of unseen roots versus excision of visible foliage. The first approach reveals, illuminates, and examines conscientiously those hidden roots inaccessible to immediate perception and, implicitly, historical roots removed in time and space. This approach also encompasses speculations about the “fruits” of future “possible solution[s]” to present

“difficulties.” The second stance, advocated by the speaker, consists of cropping the diseased or withered parts of visible reality. The speaker further equated these differing modes of site- specific visual engagement with temporalized forms of knowledge. Exposure requires a gradual, meticulous excavation to historicize, analyze, and “dwell” with the intellect whereas excision

1 Pierre Elliott Trudeau, “Opening Statement,” in HABITAT, The United Nations Conference on Human Settlements: Report of the Canadian Delegation (Ottawa: Ministry of State, Urban Affairs Canada, 1977), 54. 235 demands prompt, decisive action and radical, practical, problem solving. Visual exposure is contemplative, excision is curative.

In seeming response to Trudeau’s polarizing of these horticultural stances toward the visible, a land artwork by Reinhard Reitzenstein displayed in Vancouver during the HABITAT conference emphasized the interactions between exposure and effacement, visibility and invisibility, in a tree-filled site. Trees have inspired a large, eclectic body of artworks by

Reitzenstein (b. Uelzen, Germany, 1949), including site-specific works, performances, photographs, and sculptures incorporating living and dead trees created while he resided in

London, Ontario, and later in McDonald’s Corners, in the same province, during the 1970s. This chapter addresses Reitzenstein’s complicating of the conditions of visibility through a work made from a living tree and earth in a wooded site in 1975. My central argument is that this work reveals viewing devices that suspend the site in a tension between visual display and dissimulation. His tree-work simultaneously encourages and impedes seeing details of a site construed as a paradoxical locus of revelation and secrecy. Within this dissertation’s overall argument that land artists’ viewing devices induced a crisis in the coherence and stability of sites, this chapter advances from NETCo’s intangible, serial views, Ellis’s perceptual trickery, and

Mackenzie’s fluctuating sightlines. While these artists manipulated viewing conditions to generate unstable sites, Reitzenstein exaggerated and obliterated a site’s visibility in the artwork discussed in this chapter.

Also in distinction from the previously examined artists’ interventions in publicly accessible settings, Reitzenstein created a work on privately owned land. As the subsequent section of this chapter explains, the public encountered this ephemeral artwork through photographs taken by the artist. The physical characteristics of Reitzenstein’s choice of site, 236 however, resonate with the hybrid sites of his land art contemporaries. He incorporated a tree, the surrounding clearing, and the subterranean layers of this site. His constructing of a new site traversing a material threshold—the surface of the earth—is analogous to NETCo’s preference for the border between road and field or Ellis’s and Mackenzie’s amphibious viewfinders near the water’s edge.

Reitzenstein’s tree work embodies the third type of viewing device examined in this dissertation: the aperture. This versatile category encompasses openings, cavities, punctures, gaps, and nooks of various shapes and sizes amidst roots and in soil. Certain apertures are fully contained on all sides and thus approximate the visual function of the frame. Others, such as gaps between roots, are partially enclosed. Depending on its location, an aperture may approximate a closed pocket or cul-de-sac, on one hand, or an open tunnel or portal, on the other. Some of these vents, voids, and negative spaces were introduced by the artist while others were naturally occurring formations in the tree. Regardless of their origins, these apertures—including their contours and contents—shape one’s visual perception of the tree and its surroundings. These openings bound, offset, and filter visual details while modulating light and physically containing the artist’s body. Although such effects overlap the functions of the frames and viewfinders examined in previous chapters, the viewing apertures in Reitzenstein’s work are distinguished by their physical depth and tactility. The apertures of greatest import to this tree work are points of entry and exit physically embedded in the site, akin to a flesh wound or surgical incision. Unlike

NETCo’s frames or the viewfinders of Ellis and Mackenzie, Reitzenstein’s apertures are not transportable and cannot be modified without also physically altering the site.

To rephrase the argument of the present chapter, I affirm that the gaps and openings in this artwork accentuate the interplay between the seen and unseen, visual accessibility and 237 inaccessibility. This discussion excavates Reitzenstein’s semi-visible site by commencing with an introduction to the making, dissemination, and reception of the work central to my discussion,

Revealed Roots (1975). The trajectory of the subsequent sections follows the stages of the making of this artwork. The first half of the chapter traces the artist’s opening of a tangled network of apertures above, at, and below, ground level, which suspend the site between visibility and invisibility. Next, I develop Reitzenstein’s merging of perceptible reality with the unseen realm of the spiritual: I address the apertures’ construction of mutually underpinned notions of revelation and withdrawal from sight before turning to the artist’s ideas concerning the channelling of invisible energies. This discussion ends by addressing the artist’s simultaneous corporeal self-display and disappearance amidst the apertures. Such a strategy, I affirm, comprises a site-specific self-portraiture to be contextualized in Reitzenstein’s unearthing of his own cultural and historical roots in Canadian and European soil.

Earthen Excavation

Revealed Roots is an early, lesser-known work by the artist; nonetheless, nearly two decades after its making, he cited this artwork as a major turning point in his career.2 Statements from his interviews and public lectures of the 1990s, in tandem with photographs of his work and of himself from the 1970s, enable one to reconstruct the creation of this artwork and its apertures. Reitzenstein made one of his first works with trees, Revealed Roots (1975), on wooded family property in the Ottawa valley, Ontario [figures 48-49]. He selected a large, living ironwood, 3 a deciduous tree with pointed, ovoid leaves and ridged, grey-brown bark, also known

2 Ted Fraser, [Untitled], (contains a paraphrase of statements by Reinhard Reitzenstein), in Reinhard Reitzenstein: The World Tree (Charlottetown, PEI: Confederation Centre Art Gallery and Museum, 1993), 10.

3 John K. Grande, “. . . Untitling Nature . . . ,” (contains a paraphrase of a lecture by Reinhard Reitzenstein), in Reinhard Reitzenstein: Escarpment, Valley, Desert (Hamilton, ON: Art Gallery of Hamilton, 2002), 29. Grande noted this statement based on a talk given by the artist at the “Art and Environment Symposium” held at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, in 1991. 238 as the hop hornbeam (ostrya virginiana), found in central and southern Ontario near the Great

Lakes and the St. Lawrence forest region. As suggested by its name, the ironwood is used to make hard objects such as tool handles and even sleigh runners.4 The six photographs taken by the artist of the completed work provide information concerning the location of the tree and his working methods. As visible in these images, the ironwood grew on flat ground at a remove from other trees. He staked out the perimeter of the selected site by driving thin sticks into the earth around the tree. These punctures were the foundational apertures of the artwork. Reitzenstein also embarked on the arduous task of manually removing the earth from around and beneath the tree to create a yawning opening revealing the root system. He insisted on “[t]aking no power tools” to make art during this period.5 Hand-held tools were his equipment of choice, including a small trowel (which one critic referred to as a “spoon”).6 What appears to be a long-handled shovel is also visible behind the tree in one of the photographs [figure 49]. Although the artist has refrained from disclosing the time spent digging, his herculean labour was surely strenuous and taxing: excavating earth, scraping away debris, meticulously dusting roots, and hauling away dirt. As reported by art critic John K. Grande, the artist also recalled discovering stones enmeshed in the roots.7 Through his physical labour, Reitzenstein affiliated with the working methods of fellow Carmen Lamanna Gallery artist Robin Mackenzie. Nevertheless,

4 R. C. Hosie, Native Trees of Canada, 8th ed. (Ottawa: Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited in co-operation with the Canadian Forestry Service, Environment Canada, and the Canadian Government Publishing Centre, Supply & Services, Canada, 1979), 150-151. “Ironwood” is also a name attributed to another tree indigenous to Canada, the smaller blue-beech (carpinus caroliniana), whose smooth bark resembles muscle tissue (ibid., 152-153).

5 Reinhard Reitzenstein, [Untitled], in Carmen Lamanna Gallery at The Owens Art Gallery (Toronto: Carmen Lamanna Gallery, 1974), n.p.

6 Ted Rettig, “Contextualizing the Work of Reinhard Reitzenstein,” Espace sculpture 25 (Fall 1993): 34.

7 Grande, “. . . Untitling Nature . . . ,” (contains a paraphrase of a lecture by Reitzenstein), 29. 239

Reitzenstein’s procedure is distinct in that Revealed Roots is not an installation or sculpture added to a site. Rather, he subtracted matter and inserted his sustained presence.

The resulting visual revelation is an aperture akin to a picture or window frame on the earth. A roughly square-shaped hole displays the base of the trunk and uppermost sections of the lateral root system. This revelation is but partial, however, as the extremities of the roots remain covered. A sense of this aperture’s dimensions in relation to the body emerges in a striking photograph on a postcard advertising an unnamed solo exhibition of Reitzenstein’s work at the

Lamanna Gallery in the spring of 1976. Captured mid-excavation with the aforementioned trowel in hand, the artist gazes up intently at the camera from beneath the roots [figure 50].8 Of sufficient breadth to permit the artist to extend his arms, the cavity spans at least several feet from the centre of the trunk to the edge of the opening. Depth is suggested by the pit’s accommodation of his body sitting or even standing with his head level with the uppermost roots.

Critics and curators have interpreted Revealed Roots and other 1970s works by

Reitzenstein as either conceptual photography or performance rather than as land art. The former camp of authors cited Revealed Roots as a seminal example of the artist’s photographic documentation. Alvin Balkind, organizer of the Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition 17 Canadian

Artists (1976), likely had this work, amongst others, in mind when he emphasized the prominence of “wall pieces” on view.9 Reviewing the exhibit for Artscanada that year, John

Noel Chandler characterized Reitzenstein’s contribution as photographs “to document work

8 Postcard announcing an unnamed solo exhibition of Reinhard Reitzenstein at the Carmen Lamanna Gallery, Toronto, March 13-April 1, 1976, Reitzenstein, Reinhard 1949—Doc/Ca, Artist File, Library and Archives of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

9 Alvin Balkind, “Proem,” in 17 Canadian Artists: A Protean View (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1976), n.p.

240 unsuited for the gallery.”10 Revealed Roots and other 1970s works drew similar appraisals in the

1990s. In an essay of 1993, curator Ted Fraser referred to these works as “photowork installations.”11 Ted Rettig, in an article published the same year, nuanced previous readings of

Reitzenstein’s early art with trees by categorizing these creations as “post-minimal, process [,] and environmental works” reliant on photographic documentation.12 Meanwhile, other authors of the 1970s maintained that these early works were primarily performative. Jeanne Parkin, in 1976, encapsulated his works as explorations of temporality and natural processes manifested in

“arbitrary situations” introduced in outdoor locales.13 Two years later, critic Kay Woods glossed

Reitzenstein’s photographs of landscapes in overtly theatrical and temporal terms: his work was a “‘happening’ in nature,” a “performance,” 14 and a “game” in which details of the scenery and weather “shared top billing.”15

To these critics’ previous assessments of Reitzenstein’s work, this chapter makes numerous contributions through its subject, scope, and methodology. First, this chapter responds to the dearth of detailed research on this artist’s works of the 1970s. His art from this era has received limited published reception, primarily in the form of brief exhibition reviews. Although his later works from the 1980s and onward appear in numerous essays by art critics and curators, comprehensive scholarly treatments of this artist are lacking. Furthermore, many previous writings on Reitzenstein privileged his ecological themes yet placed little emphasis on either

10John Noel Chandler, “17 Canadian Artists: A Protean View,” Artscanada 33 (October/November 1976): 58.

11 Ted Fraser, [Untitled], in Reinhard Reitzenstein: The World Tree (Charlottetown, PEI: Confederation Centre Art Gallery and Museum, 1993), 10.

12 Rettig, “Contextualizing,” 34.

13 Jeanne Parkin, “Changing Visions---The Canadian Landscape,” Art Magazine 7:25 (March 1976): 12.

14 Kay Woods, “Reinhard Reitzenstein: Carmen Lamanna Gallery, October 29-November 17, 1977,” Artscanada 35 (February/March 1978): 64.

15 Ibid., 65. 241 historicizing his art, expanding on his avowed interest in visual perception, or interconnecting some of the diverse themes recurring across his art, thought, and writings. These three goals, however, underpin this chapter’s analysis of an early work in the context of the artist’s statements, documentation, rare photographs, published and unpublished writings, exhibitions, performances, and poetic compositions of the mid-1970s. Additionally, I maintain Revealed

Roots as land art, a category not invoked by previous authors. I mediate between earlier authors’ stances toward his art as documentary or performative by bringing to the fore the temporal, site- specific, and photographic existence of Revealed Roots as a land art-viewing device.

Breaking Ground

The first visual revelations in Reitzenstein’s work occur above ground and in the apertures opened at ground level and just beneath the earth’s surface. This section prioritizes the making of the apertures, their forms, contours, contents, and edges; these formal features unveil intertwined modes of visibility and invisibility. Reitzenstein renders the visibility of the site precarious and unstable through locational binaries of centre-periphery, ground-sky, and inside- outside.

To create Revealed Roots, the artist intervened in a site with an inherently aperture-like formation: a small, grassy clearing around a tree. He shared Ellis’s affinity with glades, glens, and other “forest openings.”16 Reitzenstein’s clearing may be considered an aperture insofar as it is a spatial container affording an unimpeded view of its contents—the tree and its immediate surroundings. In the glen, the ironwood is a central anchoring point or the equivalent to what

16 Ryan, “Dean Ellis,” (includes an interview with Ellis), n.p.

242 historians of gardens and landscape architecture refer to as an “eye catcher,” a building, obelisk, urn, or elevated sculpture strategically located in a garden or park.17

The artist then introduced his next strategy of visual display through apertures:

Reitzenstein highlighted the centrality of the tree by delineating the periphery of his chosen site with a series of small punctures in the earth. He drove two rows of narrow wooden stakes into the grass at several feet from the base of the trunk. The stakes at the outer corners of the square pit appear further driven into the ground than a second row of three or four more elevated stakes planted farther away [figures 48-49]. In piercing the earth, he opened long, narrow apertures simultaneously filled and anchored by the stakes, an act presaging his bodily entry into the earth beneath the tree. The double-layered fence of posts forms a frame, the next aperture-like viewing device introduced on the site. The sticks visibly measure and bound a perimeter, thereby marking visual orientation points for the beholder. Next, Reitzenstein established a third frame with the edges of the pit nested concentrically within the two rows of sticks, themselves bounded externally by a stretch of grass in the clearing. The artist thus achieves a quadruple-layered spatial aperture with multiple peripheries. Apart from functioning as perceptual guides visibly circumscribing the aperture of the glen, the wooden stakes also, as pointed out by critic Beth

Learn in a review of Revealed Roots from circa 1975, perform practical and symbolic functions.

Planting visual markers in earth, noted Learn, is a preparatory practice derived from archaeology to stake out a plot of land for digging and documentation. She also likened driving stakes to planting tent pegs and thus read this act as the artist’s ritual “grounding” of the site prior to art making.18

17 Patrick Taylor, “Eyecatcher,” in The Oxford Companion to the Garden, ed. Patrick Taylor, Oxford University Press, 2012, http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780198662556.001.0001/acref-9780198662556- e-0557.

243

The stakes establish horizontal and vertical relationships between centres and peripheries in the site. On the horizontal plane, the eye-catching tree occupies the focal point of the site bounded laterally by the stakes. On the vertical plane, these dowels mark the threshold between the visible tree and its hidden roots. Embedded in multiple borders, the glen itself also comprises a peripheral zone according to the artist’s thinking. In an interview with art critic John K.

Grande, Reitzenstein professed a preference for creating art in the fertile margins of sites, such as

“the edge . . . of the forest.”19 This perceptual shifting across centres and edges as initiated by the apertures of Revealed Roots recurs in his works of the mid-1970s. Critic Gloria Smedor, in her review of Reitzenstein’s exhibition of landscape photographs in 1975 at the Forest City Gallery in London, Ontario, noted that his “photographs . . . do not allow the viewer to stand on the perimeter of his work” but rather invite a visual plunge into the midst of the forest and “the depth of snowholes.”20 In another observation applicable to the crossing of peripheral zones in

Revealed Roots, Dennis Oppenheim explained in 1969 that digging into earth disclosed the

“relational” positioning between the body and its ultimate material periphery, the planetary sphere.21

The stakes also symbolically conjoin the unseen, subterranean layers of the site with the visible realm above. Unlike the signposts of NETCo’s Quarter-Mile N.E. Thing Co. Landscape

(1969) which orchestrated the beholder’s unfolding serial view along a horizontal plane of motion, Reitzenstein’s stakes align the visible with the invisible along a vertical axis. Fixed in

18Beth Learn, “Reinhard Reitzenstein: Psychic Realism—The Terms of Natural Equivalence,” Queen Street Magazine 3:2, February 1977, 45.

19 Reinhard Reitzenstein, “Earth in Context: Reinhard Reitzenstein,” interview by John K. Grande, in Art Nature Dialogues: Interviews with Environmental Artists (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004), 200.

20 Gloria Smedor, “Around London,” Artmagazine 26-27 (May/June 1976): 61.

21 Dennis Oppenheim, [Transcript], (Earth Art symposium, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, February 6, 1969), in Earth Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1970), n.p. 244 their apertures, the sticks act as depth probes gauging the mysteries of unrevealed strata or as tuning forks testing the pitch of the depths. The artist’s methodical driving of oblong objects in the soil also suggests an attempt to extract hidden resources coursing through the humus and the tree, akin to tapping a tree for maple syrup, building a pipeline, or digging a mineshaft. Via the puncture-apertures, he administers diagnostic or curative probings through ersatz thermometers, acupuncture needles, or hypodermic syringes to a site implicitly construed as a body.

Reitzenstein then extended this dialogue between the seen and the unseen by opening a new network of apertures around the base of the tree. He scraped away the soil and grass from the ironwood to the inner fence of stakes. The removal, and consequent invisibility, of matter previously visible around the tree permitted the newfound visibility of deeper layers of soil amidst the gaps and nooks in the topmost roots. This visual exposure also derives from the site’s gradual, partial eclipse from the artist’s sight. Kneeling for hours to carve out these apertures with eyes fixed attentively on his meticulous labour, the artist performed a kind of willful blindness to the rest of the woods. He chose not to see the forest for the tree. As his digging progressed and the intricate web of apertures stretched ever further downward, he chose not to see the trunk for the roots. From the viewpoint of the artist in mid-excavation, the opening of these new gaps, interstices, and negative spaces amidst previously hidden depths coincided with the fading of the glen from immediate visual attention. Crouching upon and then climbing into the earth, Reitzenstein acquired a close, eye-level scrutiny of the minutiae of blades of grass, wildflowers, stones, and clumps of soil akin to that captured by Albrecht Dürer’s watercolour

The Great Piece of Turf (1503) [figure 51].

In clearing out the soil from around the roots, Reitzenstein opened a network of apertures functioning as a screen presenting and obscuring details of the site above and below ground. By 245

“screen,” I refer not to a surface on which to project or display an image but to the term as employed by geographers to designate vegetation that partially blocks the view of distant forms in an actual or represented landscape.22 In the case of Revealed Roots, the root-screen occupies another aperture, the square opening of the pit. As a frame and window, this latter opening comprises a “peephole” vista, defined by geographers and scholars of landscape design as a restricted opening fully delimited on all sides, as exemplified by windows and archways.23

Reitzenstein’s pairing of vegetal screen and peephole forms a three-dimensional, venous structure of a more irregular pattern than a latticework or geometric grid. Rather, the work approximates a net, web, or meshwork. Extending downward and outward, the apertures amidst the revealed roots fuse elements of both the slanting gaps in Ellis’s upright log viewfinder and the quadrangles and grids traced by Mackenzie’s ground-level work.

However, Reitzenstein’s work is distinguished from those of his contemporaries in that his root-screen apertures rework an iconic motif of 20th-century Canadian landscape visuality: the obstructive vegetal tangle. Celebrated tangles are found, for example, in the fine, silhouetted black filigree of tree trunks and branches filtering luminescent patches of wilderness in the foreground of Tom Thomson’s stained glass-like Northern River (1914-15), discussed in Chapter

One [figure 52], and the chaotic, dense cluster of flowers, foliage, and trees offering a fragmented view of a house in the background of J. E. H. MacDonald’s The Tangled Garden

(1916) [figure 53]. To the tangle, Revealed Roots integrates that hallmark figure of the landscape paintings of the Group of Seven and Emily Carr, the lone tree. Reitzenstein makes central the optic of the tangled screen proffering partial views gradually uncovered.

22 Jakle, The Visual Elements of Landscape, 44-45.

23 Ibid., 44. 246

In paying homage to such canonic tangles, Reitzenstein’s root-screen reveals a semi- invisible site producing perceptual and psychological effects particular to landscape screens. As geographer John A. Jakle explained, the traditional vegetal screen affects the viewer of the screened vista in numerous ways. A screen’s partial “masking” of scenery may exaggerate the distance between the beholder and the vista, thereby imbuing a site with grandeur and heightened mystery. The smattering of visual fragments glimpsed through the screen piques the viewer’s curiosity.24 In Jakle’s words, the screen “invites visual exploration toward the discovery of details”25 in a site that “shows a new face or a new intensity.”26 In a subtler manner, peepholes produce a visual effect in which “[t]he eye is drawn forward and held” upon scenery.27

However, the apertures of Reitzenstein’s work trump the suggested promise of a complete, definitive, or rewarding visual discovery and perceptual fixing as described by Jakle’s discussion of typical landscape apertures. The dense, unruly forms of the expansive Revealed

Roots screen obstruct the view below ground and pre-empt a complete visual or bodily traversal through the square peephole. The artist-beholder remains ensconced in the very midst of the screen to survey a subterranean site choked with roots and stones and veiled by shadows.

Whereas the conventional screen beckons the viewer to discover the enigmatic vista beyond,

Reitzenstein’s root-screen offers itself instead as a mysterious view. Although of considerable physical depth, this choked earthen pit betrays a limited “fetch,” defined as “the distance over

24Ibid., 44-45.

25 Ibid., 45.

26Ibid., 44.

27Ibid., 47. 247 which visibility can be achieved” in a prospect.28 In lieu of visually revealing newness and variety, Revealed Roots plunges one into increasingly obscure layers of roots and earth.

Reitzenstein’s arboreal screen also defies the conventional peephole’s function of holding one’s visual attention in a particular angle and direction. Revealed Roots does not offer a uniform, consistent visual filtering as the degree and type of visibility are contingent upon viewing position, whether on land, amidst the roots, or aloft in the branches. Of the land artists examined, Reitzenstein is distinct for constructing a negative space to be literally looked down into and up from. Hence, while the work renders the site difficult to perceive, it nonetheless reveals the artist’s keen interest in locating the body and determining its postures and positions vis à vis the apertures. To the observer standing on the ground near the tree and looking downward, the uppermost layers of crisscrossing roots divide the view of the earth below into a knotted net of innumerable compartments of varying size. From this vantage point, the screen suggests irregular cage bars imprisoning Reitzenstein in a claustrophobic subterranean cell.

The downward view through the ironwood’s screen finds an uncanny foil in the underground apertures of a later work entitled Root-Sculpture (1995) created by German land artist Nils-Udo in Chapultepec Park, Mexico City [figure 54]. After a draught, Nils-Udo and a crew of assistants carved out the earth around a section of the roots of a tree to form a square opening.29 The dusty roots were of the same blanched, faded grey shade as the parched soil that seemed, in the artist’s words, “almost like concrete.”30 In comparison with the tangled depths screened by Reitzenstein, Nils-Udo’s work is more evocative of a small, neatly incised, one-way picture window bounding a cascade of roots. In structure and visual effect, Nils-Udo’s work is

28 Appleton, The Experience of Landscape , 89.

29 Hubert Besacier, Nils-Udo: L’art dans la nature (Paris: Flammarion, 2002), 94-95.

30Ibid., (includes an interview with Nils-Udo), 95. 248 closer to the classic definition of a peephole vista than Reitzenstein’s square root-screen. Nils-

Udo’s root-screen ramifies into elongated slits through which shadows are thrown into stark relief against the pallor of desiccated roots in harsh sunlight. In comparison with the interplay of seen and unseen in Reitzenstein’s earthen peephole, Nils-Udo’s work places greater emphasis on the visibility, illumination, and the distinctiveness of the forms in his earthen window. This contrast partially derives from Nils-Udo’s conception of his work as a “sculpture” of “hard,” tangible forms in an open void. Reitzenstein, however, emphasizes negative spaces and diminished visual “revelation.” Whereas the openings of Root-Sculpture illuminate and clarify one’s view into the earth through a play of contrasting colours and lines, the tangled, intricate meshwork of Revealed Roots constructs sight as gradual and incomplete.

Meanwhile, from the vantage point of the artist digging in the earth and gazing upward,

Revealed Roots offers a visual experience differing significantly from that of the beholder standing on the ground and peering down into the pit. Reitzenstein recalled looking up through the roots and noticing their silhouetted appearance against the sky.31 To the viewer submerged in the earth, the root-screen appears like the thick dark tracery in a stained glass window filtering sunlight into the square pit. The root-canopy presents a skyward vista somewhat less obstructed than the subterranean scene.

The deliberately compromised visibility engendered by Reitzenstein’s filigree of roots is highlighted when contrasted with the sensitized visibility elicited by the vegetal screens and meshes of American artist Michael Singer. Working in forests and bodies of water during the late

1970s, Singer tied together reeds, twigs, and branches to create fine, lyrical screens that heighten visual awareness of sites. One example, First Gate Ritual Series (1976), built in Nassau County,

New York, consists of a spidery construction of saplings, sticks, and pliable vegetal materials

31 Fraser, [Untitled], (includes a paraphrased interview with Reinhard Reitzenstein), 10. 249 installed amongst trees in water [figure 55]. This screen is a calligraphic tracery that deftly slices the view into irregular, curvilinear segments. This “gate” leads the eyes down the watery axis between the trees and through successive layers of meshwork. Attenuated shadows cast by the trees on the water undulate down this axis as if to meld with the screen’s parabolic lines. Singer explained his art as “an apparatus to see more of what I am, where I am” in addition to providing spatial “clues.”32 Art historian Gilles A. Tiberghien similarly interpreted the Ritual series as

“feelers” guiding the eyes.33 Critic Kate Linker expanded upon these meshworks with the metaphor of optical apertures (and, implicitly, viewfinders) in an article of 1977. She likened these works to “prisms, microscopes, monocles” that enhanced, clarified, and focused vision upon particular sites. These lens-like works represent “a mode of thinking in which the landscape is rendered visible by objects.”34 In contrast to Singer’s quest to reveal sites, Reitzenstein employs revelation mediated by apertures to problematize sight. Whereas Singer’s screen guides sight across looping, free-form trajectories through an unimpeded spatial corridor, Reitzenstein defers sight through a massive tangle.

The apertures of Reitzenstein’s root-screen manifest another strategy of visual revelation that would recur in various permutations throughout his oeuvre: inversion. Inversion figures implicitly in his memory of looking up through the roots from the earthen burrow in the manner of an observer standing on land while gazing at tree branches. To the artist in the pit, what usually lays solidly underfoot has become an airy canopy spread overhead. Regarding this point, critic Chris Dewdney aptly observed that “roots are dark reflections of branches” revealed to

32 Kate Linker, “Michael Singer: A Position in, and on, Nature” (includes an interview with Michael Singer), Arts 52:3 (November 1977); reprinted in Art in the Land: A Critical Anthology of Environmental Art, ed. Alan Sonfist (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1983), 188.

33 Gilles A. Tiberghien, Nature, art, paysage (Arles: Actes sud, 2001), 138.

34 Linker, “Michael Singer,” 184.

250 sight in the 1980s tree-works of Reitzenstein, a comment equally pertinent to Revealed Roots.35

Through visual inversion, Reitzenstein probes the visual and conceptual potential of

“underground stems and aerial roots” which theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari enumerated, along with the rhizome,36 as structures defying the hierarchical, fixed, centered, genealogical, binary relation-based “arborescent culture” dominant in Western thought, language, science, and society.37 Whereas the apertures of Revealed Roots effect a form of visual inversion through the morphological similarities between the upper and lower extremities of the tree, in works of the 1980s onward, he literally uprooted, suspended, or re-planted trees upside down.38 Performing a similar physical flipping on the photographs of Revealed Roots discloses an unreal, upside-down world in the apertures or, in the words of Reitzenstein, a “parallel reality” of inversion [figure 56].39 The photographic flipside yields more of a distortion than a reflection. In this sequence of views, the apertures cut out amidst the roots now hover menacingly like a dark cloud. The inverted roots cum branches jut upward like giant fingers clawing a hole in the firmament. Inverted grass metamorphoses into a hirsute sky from which the wooden stakes drip like sharp stalactites. This topsy-turvy version reveals a dystopic forest.

To the optical effects produced by Revealed Roots, the soil contributes strategies of visual disclosure and dissimulation in the hole in the earth. Throughout the artist’s digging, soil

35 Chris Dewdney, “Reinhard Reitzenstein,” in The Psychic Symbolism of Reinhard Reitzenstein (Hamilton, ON: Art Gallery of Hamilton, 1989), 8.

36 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Rhizome,” in On the Line, trans. John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 33.

37 Ibid., 47-49.

38 These literal, physical inversions by Reitzenstein bear a striking resemblance to an obscure work by Robert Smithson, 2nd Upside-Down Tree (1969), an uprooted tree stuffed, branches down, into the sand on Captiva Island, Florida. No evidence suggests that Reitzenstein knew of this work by Smithson. 2nd Upside-Down Tree (1969) is reproduced in Robert Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan,” Artforum (September 1969); reprinted in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 132.

39 Reitzenstein, “Earth in Context,” 199. 251 becomes a medium of gradual and incomplete visual revelation of what lies below the tree. As the large aperture takes form, clods of earth also form part of the dense array of subterranean visual content brought to light. The soil removed from the aperture continues to figure in the interplay of display and concealment. As captured in the series of photographs taken by the artist, the dirt dug from around the roots was heaped along the edges of the earthen aperture, forming a ring of rubble. The exposure of the pit coincides with the nearby heap of detritus masking the formerly visible ground by the tree. Reitzenstein’s emphasis on the physical removal and displacement of soil as a means of perceptual revelation and concealment distinguishes Revealed Roots from numerous contemporaneous artworks that insisted more upon the tangibility, phenomenology, and diverse cultural meanings of earth (whether as nourishing humus, unrefined matter, worthless excrement, or adaptable sculptural material).40 Sculptural works of earth are most amply represented by earthworks and works of earth, dirt, sand, and turf shown for the preeminent exhibitions Earth Art (1969) at Cornell University and Earth, Air,

Fire, Water: Elements of Art (1971) at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.41

Reitzenstein employed soil not as a sculptural matter from which to shape a solid art object but rather to open and mould a conduit for air, a function with particular repercussions pertaining to sight. Soil is porous and consists partially of oxygen essential for nourishing the roots of a tree. The aperture opened by the artist below the tree permitted a massive influx of air

40 In an essay for the seminal Earth Art exhibition of 1969, Willoughby Sharp chronicled 20th-century artists working with earth, beginning with Marcel Duchamp. See Willoughby Sharp, “Notes Toward an Understanding of Earth Art,” in Earth Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1970), n.p. Also, see Cassie Wu, Philipp Kaiser, and Miwon Kwon, “Annotated Chronology of Group Exhibitions and Events,” in Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, organized by Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2012), 249-254. For an analysis of earth as an unrepresentable, impenetrable element in ecologically conscious contemporary artworks, see Amanda Boetzkes, The Ethics of Earth Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 14-15.

41 Earth Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1970); Earth, Air, Fire, Water: Elements of Art (Boston: Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 1971). 252 to the revealed root system. Soil aeration (although not in the drastic manner practiced by

Reitzenstein) is an established technique for encouraging root growth by increasing the supply of oxygen and nutrients.42 The pit also allowed air circulation to sustain the artist in his physical exertions in the stifling, cramped space. However, the opening of the pit not only facilitates ventilation but also threatens the artist with imminent suffocation from soil crumbling into the pit and a tree collapsing from a lack of solid anchorage. The removal of earth and entry of air also disrupt the site’s ecosystem. Thus, the visibility of artist, apertures, and tree are menaced.

The artist’s minimal measures to buttress the root-screen heighten the threat of suffocation and obliteration from view. At the lower left corner of the Lamanna Gallery postcard depicting Reitzenstein in the pit is a cluster of roots held together by a slender rope secured with a single knot [figure 50]. His free hand is the only other prop beneath the roots. Although the artist would later recall marvelling at the complex “support structure” provided by the roots for the entire tree,43 Learn found that the lack of supplemental support for the exposed roots created a sense of “danger magnified.”44 The apertures provide a tenuous buffer against the external contents threatening to inundate the burrow.

Reitzenstein’s construction of a fraught relation between the inside and outside of the earthen aperture finds clarification through a comparison with Nancy Holt’s art. During the

1970s, Holt created numerous “locators,” cylinders, usually fixed, in both indoor and outdoor settings. Each locator provides viewers with the same enclosed circular view, or rather views, as one can gaze through either end of the pipe.45 One particular outdoor work by Holt recalls

42 John R. Hartman, Thomas P. Pirone, and Mary Ann Sall, Pirone’s Tree Maintenance, 7th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 35-36.

43 Grande, “. . . Untitling Nature . . . ,” 29.

44 Learn, “Psychic Realism,” 45.

253

Revealed Roots on account of its penetration of earth. In 1972, Holt installed a tube through sand on Narragansett Beach, Rhode Island, to create Views Through a Sand Dune [figure 57]. This work is representative of what she has explained as her sustained interest in heightening viewers’ consciousness of sight and perception through works that focus, orient, and even disorient sight.46 In relation to Reitzenstein’s apertures, Holt’s work provides an informative foil through her careful regulation of the interior and exterior of the locator. The pipe circumscribes a fixed circular view distinct from the surrounding amorphous heap of sand. The sand and stringy grasses make no immediate infringement upon the vista in the sturdy locator. On the contrary, the sand secures the pipe in place and thus maintains the integrity of a clear, unobstructed peephole vista. Holt’s photograph underscores the controlled separation and striking contrast between the interior of the locator and its exterior. Taken at an oblique angle in relation to the locator, the photograph captures the smooth, hard, curved internal surface of the pipe cast in shadow and clearly differentiated from the soft dune and feathery plants illuminated by sunlight.

In response to Views Through a Sand Dune and other locators, art historians and critics have interpreted Holt’s works as not only locating view and viewer, but more significantly (in relation to Reitzenstein), as containing sight and sites. Locators effect containment by maintaining clear boundaries between the inside and outside of the viewing device. Ted Castle described Holt as reorienting sight through “strong enclosures with carefully controlled apertures”47 opening onto “very circumscribed views.”48 Lucy R. Lippard has evocatively

45 Ted Castle, “Nancy Holt, Siteseer,” Art in America (March 1982): 88.

46 Ibid., (includes an interview with Nancy Holt), 90.

47 Ibid., 87.

48 Ibid., 88. 254 referred to the locators as “miniature tunnels, rooms for the eye”49 and Ines Schaber has analyzed how sight is “encompassed” in Holt’s locators.50 Whereas her locators are stable apertures that visually demarcate and separate, Reitzenstein’s disorderly, overlapping apertures chaotically intermix internal and external, perceptible and obscure. Unlike Holt’s piercing of the dune,

Reitzenstein’s digging produces a drawn-out viewing experience during which a complete view of the exposed roots and deeper layers of earth remains deliberately deferred, unfulfilled, and subject to potential collapse.

Subterranean Strata

Shifting from the material contents and surfaces of Revealed Roots, I now address the intangible qualities of the large burrow excavated beneath the tree. This pit brings to the foreground the visual and aesthetic potential of an art of negative space and displaced matter.

Within this void emerges a spectacle in which absence and visual plenitude compete. As will be shown, this aperture requires a rethinking, through the terms of visibility and invisibility, of negative space and emptiness.

In opening a cavity brimming with intricate visual detail, Reitzenstein affirmed the mutual underpinning of visible presence and absence. In the making of this artwork, digging is both subtractive and additive. As a subtractive process, excavation creates spatial voids that are visible traces and reminders of matter removed and absent from view. This absence or lack is also a prerequisite for the presence of a new view of what was formerly concealed—the root system, earthworms, and layers of soil beneath the tree. The depths of the void house a keenly experienced visible presence. Digging is therefore also an additive process in that multitudinous

49 Lucy R. Lippard, “Tunnel Visions: Nancy Holt’s Art in the Public Eye,” in Nancy Holt: Sightlines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 61.

50 Ines Schaber, “The Claims She Stakes: A Reading of Nancy Holt’s Archive,” in Nancy Holt: Sightlines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 168. 255 forms emerge vividly into sight. Illi-Maria Tamplin, director of the Peterborough Art Gallery, described his interaction with earth in his works of the 1970s as “discovering and then releasing forms from the earth . . . .”51

The visual complexity of the voids, gaps, and pockets of Revealed Roots embody the artist’s conception of the inherent perceptual and cultural plenitude of sites. This conviction appears in an anecdote recounted in 1988 concerning a conversation he had had on a plane with a

“Euro curator/critic.”52 While on a flight across the Canadian Prairies, the curator commented that “‘there’s nothing down there.’”53 Reitzenstein also said, as reported by critic Ted Rettig, that the curator “mentioned that the trouble with Canadian culture was experienced in flying from

Montreal to Toronto, that there was nothing in between, that it was empty.”54 The artist elaborated that to the curator, the absence of “obvious signs” of Occidental civilization, such as monumental buildings or built structures visible from the aircraft,55 signalled the nation’s staggering, problematic geographical and cultural void. The curator fully omitted any acknowledgement of the presence of aboriginal and rural communities, small towns, and wilderness populated by flora and fauna. He conflated the unseen (from the perspective of an airplane window) with the non-existent. Reitzenstein dismissed these remarks as condescending cultural chauvinism. The artist concluded that the European curator “didn’t allow for the unknown, for what was there, for what he couldn’t possibly see out of an aeroplane window. In

51 Illi-Maria Tamplin, Introduction to Reinhard Reitzenstein (Peterborough, ON: Peterborough Art Gallery, 1988), n.p.

52 Joan Borsa, “Whose Stories Which Nature: Retracing Faint Paths,” (includes an interview with Reitzenstein, November 1988), in Maskunow: A Trail, a Path (St. John’s, NFLD: Memorial University Art Gallery, 1991), 4. Ted Rettig identified the European as Jean-Christophe Ammann, Director of the Basel Kunsthalle, and dates the conversation between the curator and Reitzenstein to 1984; see Rettig, “Contextualizing,” 33.

53Ibid., (includes an interview with Reitzenstein), 4.

54 Rettig, “Contextualizing,” (includes a paraphrased interview with Reitzenstein), 33.

55 Borsa, “Whose Stories,” (includes an interview with Reitzenstein), 4 256 older native traditions, each place had meaning, its own meaning.”56 This anecdote illustrates how the limitations of vision and the misrecognition engendered by cultural biases shape perceptions of emptiness and vacancy. Through the openings and gaps of Revealed Roots, the artist refutes the equation of absence from sight with absolute nothingness or lack. His apertures are replete with the visible effects and traces of absence.

In subtracting soil and boulders from the site, Reitzenstein fills the earthen vessel with air, not visible to the naked eye, and light, both of which perpetuate the interaction between emptiness and plenitude in the site. As already noted, the drastic oxygen influx into the burrow comprises a fullness with the potential to obliterate the newly exposed underground view. A less perilous plenitude results from the artist’s manipulation of the very medium ensuring visibility: sunlight. In permitting the entry of light, the vents in the root-screen function akin to eyes or camera apertures. Illuminative revelation, however, is concomitant with a dissimilating obscurity. The dense root-screen and the bulky tree trunk cast deep shadows in the pit, as illustrated by the Lamanna Gallery postcard.

In compromising viewing conditions in the site, the artist appeals to non-visual perception. In the mid-1970s, Reitzenstein declared his quest to enhance sight through his art,57 an agenda that Walter Klepac praised as an “effort . . . to counteract the perceptual habits which most of us . . . have acquired from our urban conditioning” (words evoking statements made by and about NETCo and Ellis).58 Reitzenstein pursued this counteraction by making visually perceptible artworks that integrated invisible phenomena and non-optical sensations. For

56 Ibid., (includes an interview with Reitzenstein), 4.

57 Reitzenstein, “Reinhard Reitzenstein,” n.p.

58 Walter Klepac, “Reinhard Reitzenstein: Carmen Lamanna Gallery,” Queen Street Magazine 3:1, September 1975; this article, as preserved in Reitzenstein, Reinhard 1949—Doc/Ca, Artist File, Library and Archives of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, lacks page numbers. 257 instance, he strove to enrich his art’s “visual aspect”59 by appealing to hearing in works incorporating sound and music.60 He also relished “the powerful, mnemonic device of aroma that

I constantly refer to throughout my work.”61 In Revealed Roots, diminished visual clarity intensifies sensitivity to the sounds of the trowel scraping, an elevated heart rate brought on by digging, the textures of knotted roots, and the enveloping odours of humus.

Revealed Roots contributes to a wider engagement with optical and non-optical experience in negative spaces in art of the 1960s and 1970s. The artistic terrain of the period was pitted with trenches, graves, and bunkers dug by artists as well as time capsules and buried objects. The most monumental of these works is Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969), examined in the Introduction. During the late 1960s, he made numerous depressions, cuts, furrows, and in critic David Bourdon’s words, “negative sculptures” in earth.62 The two best- known sixties digging works are Sol LeWitt’s Buried Cube Containing an Object of Importance

But Little Value (1968), a box buried in Bergeyk, the Netherlands, and Claes Oldenburg’s (Hole)

Placid Civic Monument (1967), a hole dug in Central Park, New York.63 Other famed interments include Robert Smithson’s self-descriptively titled Partially Buried Woodshed (1970) and Keith

Arnatt’s Self-Burial (Television Interference Project) (1969) and Liverpool Beach-Burial (1968),

59 Reinhard Reitzenstein, artist statement, October 21, 1975, Forest City Gallery, Reitzenstein, Reinhard 1949— Doc/Ca, Artist File, Library and Archives of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

60Reinhard Reitzenstein (London, ON: London Art Gallery, in cooperation with the Carmen Lamanna Gallery, 1977), n.p.

61 Fraser, [Untitled], (includes an interview with Reitzenstein), 17.

62 David Bourdon, Designing the Earth: The Human Impulse to Shape Nature (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995), 216.

63 On burial in sculptural artworks of the 1960s, see Boettger, Earthworks, 1-9; 88-90.

258 a mass interment of about one hundred participants in sand up to their necks.64 Given the substantial literature on digging and burial artworks, I restrict my discussion to critical readings of these works’ treatment of seeing sites. As examined in the Introduction, Boettger has interpreted artists’ digging and burying as the withdrawal of art from visual perception in resistance to modernist opticality and visual aesthetics. Burial, argues Boettger, manifested artists’ privileging of the conceptual above the perceptual and, in Lucy Lippard’s term, the

“dematerialized” artwork withdrawn from direct viewing.65 This position is exemplified by

LeWitt’s proposal for Buried Cube—as provided in Smithson’s 1969 essay “Aerial Art”—as a

“non-visual” and “concept”-based work.66 In 1977, Lippard emphasized the anti-materialistic ethics behind burial-themed artworks. She observed in 1970s art an “aesthetic which rejected in principle the accumulation of more and more objects in the world.” She made the following elaboration:

To paraphrase Dennis Oppenheim, Michael Heizer [,] and Douglas Huebler, the ‘negative’ process of excavating, . . . is preferred to the erection of monuments. [Henry David] Thoreau suggested a century ago that all our buildings should be buried like rocks, so as not to ‘outrage nature.’67

In contrast with the non-visual, anti-materialistic negative spaces carved by many of his contemporaries, Reitzenstein explicitly embraced excavation to expand visual perception,

64 Keith Arnatt, “Liverpool Beach-Burial (1968),” in Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972; A Cross-Reference Book of Information on Some Esthetic Boundaries, ed. Lucy R. Lippard (New York: Praeger, 1973), 50-51. Also see “Annotated Checklist of the Exhibition,” in Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, organized by Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2012), 187.

65 Boettger, Earthworks, 88-90.

66 Robert Smithson, “Aerial Art,” Studio International (April 1969); reprinted in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 118.

67 Lucy R. Lippard, “Art Outdoors, In and Out of the Public Domain: A Slide Lecture,” Studio International 193 (March/April 1977): 87.

259 sensorial experience, and psychic awareness.68 Through the apertures of Revealed Roots, he demonstrated that the unseen and invisible need not constitute anti-optical art.

Hybrid Habitats

Despite Reitzenstein’s pro-optical aesthetics, Revealed Roots does illustrate a variant of the anti-monumental, underground architecture referred to by Lippard as a characteristic motif of

1970s art. His completed earthen aperture is a semi-enclosed, canopy-covered shelter for his body. This section considers the definition of “aperture” as a form of dwelling to be historicized in 1970s site-specific art. Revealed Roots is notable as one of the few artworks shown at the 17

Canadian Artists exhibition that explicitly engaged with habitation and is thus a direct link between the exhibition and HABITAT, the UN Conference on Human Settlements, both held in

Vancouver in the summer of 1976. I propose that Reitzenstein’s shelter translates the tension between visible and invisible into the “hide-and-seek aesthetics” of “habitat theory” as developed by geographer Jay Appleton in the middle of that decade.69

The crawlspace beneath the ironwood mediates between rudimentary architecture and an animal’s underground burrow or lair. Revealed Roots embodies the artist’s interest in what he described as “biological shelters, cavities that can be seen as architecture.”70 Rather than a functional “house” for people, the work offers a temporary, makeshift “habitat,” a term employed in botany, zoology, and natural history.71 Motifs of animal habitats incorporating apertures of the various types discussed in this chapter—screens, punctures, and cavities, for example—surface in 1970s site-specific art. The following fauna habitat works consist of

68 Reitzenstein, “Reinhard Reitzenstein,” n.p.

69 Appleton, The Experience of Landscape, 101.

70 Reitzenstein, “Earth in Context,” 201.

71 Oxford English Dictionary, 1989 ed., s.v. “habitat.” 260 openings that visually display human bodies or subterranean spaces. In Gordon Matta-Clark’s

Tree Dance (1971), a performance filmed at the campus of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie,

New York, performers scaled a tree and swung from an airy cat’s cradle of ropes, rope ladders, wooden swings, nets, and sheets in the branches [figures 58, 59].72 Alan Sonfist made a cast of the interior of an Abandoned Animal Hole (1974).73 Perhaps the most famous shelter-cavity of the era is Nils-Udo’s The Nest of 1978. Built from branches, saplings, stones, and earth in a forest in Lüneburg, Germany,74 this monumental wooden bowl cradled the naked artist curled in a foetal position [figure 60].

The integration of the architectural and the arboreal in Revealed Roots partakes of the pervasiveness of habitats in art of the 1970s, a phenomenon noted by writers of the era. Gene

Youngblood, in an Artscanada article of 1970, referred to the “‘habitat art’” of Allan Kaprow and Canadian Gary Lee-Nova which consisted of experiments in “programming and processing” human habitats.75 Robert Morris’s article “Aligned with Nazca” (1975), discussed in Chapter

Three, emphasized the multitude of enclosed shelters for the body in 1970s site-specific installations and sculptures,76 an observation echoed by other writers’ references to the

“contained” forms prevalent in American in situ art of that decade77 and an artistic “attitude”

72 Elisabeth Sussman, “The Mind is Vast and Ever Present,” in Gordon Matta-Clark: You are the Measure, ed. Elisabeth Sussman (New Haven: Yale University Press, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2007), 16. In the same exhibition catalogue, see also Tina Kukielski, “In the Spirit of the Vegetable: The Early Works of Gordon Matta- Clark (1969-1971),” 34-45.

73 Alan Sonfist, Nature the End of Art: Environmental Landscapes (Florence: Gli Ori, 2004), 151-152.

74 Zorn, Nils-Udo, 111.

75Gene Youngblood, “World Game: The Artist as Ecologist,” Artscanada 27 (August 1970): 48.

76 Morris, “Aligned with Nazca,” 33, 35.

77 Nancy D. Rosen, “A Sense of Place: Five American Artists,” Studio International 193 (March/April 1977): 120. 261 toward the natural environment expressed through the building of enclosures outdoors.78 In

“Complexes: Architectural Sculpture in Nature,” published in Art in America in 1979, Lippard profiled artists who built “complexes,”79 “shelters,”80 “caves” (the “prototypical shelter[s]”),

“biomorphic body-related ‘architectural sculpture[s],’”81 and “organically inspired” sanctuaries.82 She underscored “architectural references, interior space [,] and siting in nature” as features common to these works.83

Whereas critics focused on the structure and formal qualities of shelter-art, I draw from the work of Appleton to clarify the importance of sight in the habitat-aperture of Revealed Roots.

To explain this point I situate Reitzenstein’s work in relation to the “habitat theory” and the related “prospect-refuge theory” elucidated by Appleton in his seminal The Experience of

Landscape published in 1975,84 the year Reitzenstein created Revealed Roots. Appleton drew from studies of animal behaviour to develop his ideas about humans’ aesthetic responses to landscapes with an emphasis on sight. He began with the observation that animals select habitats that meet biological needs.85 He then argued that humans are similarly attracted to, and thus derive “aesthetic satisfaction” from, actual and represented scenery propitious to survival.86

78 Mark Rosenthal, “Some Attitudes of Earth Art: From Competition to Adoration,” in Art in the Land: A Critical Anthology of Environmental Art,ed. Alan Sonfist (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1983), 64-66.

79 Lippard, “Complexes,” 86.

80 Ibid., 88.

81 Ibid., 87.

82 Ibid., 88.

83 Ibid., 86. Jungian thought inspired Lippard’s analysis of these works: she maintained that the shelter was both a physical structure and a “psychological archetype” (ibid.).

84Although Appleton would refine and reapply his ideas on prospect-refuge theory in the 1980s and 1990s, I refer to the original 1975 edition of his book due to its historical proximity to Reitzenstein’s work.

85 Appleton, The Experience of Landscape, 64.

262

The role of sight in habitat theory is apparent in Appleton’s related prospect-refuge theory, details of which accord with certain physical features and modes of seeing and not-seeing evident in Revealed Roots. Appleton explained prospect-refuge theory as “[t]he theory that the ability to see without being seen is conducive to the exploitation of environmental conditions favourable to biological survival and is therefore a source of pleasure.”87 In general, he was less concerned with physical survival in the wilderness than with perceptual, emotional, and aesthetic responses elicited by symbols and images in art and gardens.88

Viewers exercise this “ability” to see strategically in two environments—prospects and refuges—that are not distinct opposites but can exist singly or together in one site.89 Reitzenstein constructed a site combining both categories and which thereby participates in what Appleton termed the “hide-and-seek aesthetics” of the prospect-refuge dynamic.90 Prospects enable one to see one’s surroundings91 and include panoramas, vistas, and elevated vantage points.92

Reitzenstein’s ironwood provides a high vantage point from which to inspect the clearing while the open cavity below opens onto an enclosed subterranean vista. Appleton also enumerated peepholes amongst prospects, of which Reitzenstein’s square opening is an example.93 The wooded locale and confined receptacles of Revealed Roots also conform to the definition of a

86 Ibid., 69. Appleton later developed his argument for a Darwinian, biological interpretation of human landscape perception and appreciation in The Symbolism of Habitat: An Interpretation of Landscape in the Arts (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990), 22.

87 Appleton, The Experience of Landscape , 270.

88 Ibid., 81.

89 Ibid.,73-4.

90Ibid.,101.

91Ibid.,73.

92Ibid., 88.

93 Ibid., 88-89. 263 refuge as a site providing security, shelter, and means of hiding from the eyes of others;94 examples include caves, nests, forests, burrows, ravines, buildings, even mist.95 Meanwhile, the artist huddled in the burrow benefits from both the refuge of darkness and the sunlit-viewing associated with prospects.96

Nevertheless, the interplay between seen and unseen in Reitzenstein’s tree apertures deftly combines prospect and refuge in a hybrid habitat overturning Appleton’s categories. The earthen aperture is an unstable, inhospitable refuge offering neither effective shelter nor security to its occupant. Furthermore, this quasi-refuge does not provide shielding privacy but instead frames and exhibits the artist to the camera as captured in the Lamanna Gallery postcard.

Meanwhile, Reitzenstein pointedly denied the role of the tree as an elevated prospect: only the first two of the six documentary photos of the completed Revealed Roots include the entire trunk and part of the branches while most of the images focus on the exposed root system. Conveying the artist’s lack of interest in the upper parts of the tree, these images render a lofty prospect invisible. The primary scene visible in this work is the non-vista of the shadowy, obstructed pit.

The artist designed an anti-habitat coupling an exposed refuge with an obscured prospect.

Insights on Sites

The process of “hide-and-seek” particular to Reitzenstein’s habitat is the movement between concealment and discovery; his giant aperture is the seat of revelation. I now address

“revelation” as a distinct category of viewing active in the openings of Revealed Roots and central to the artist’s working methods. His labour unleashed a chain of revelations and dissimulations, both intended and accidental. Moreover, perceptual disclosures in the apertures

94 Ibid., 73.

95 Ibid., 102.

96 Ibid., 112. 264 are inextricable from Reitzenstein’s intellectual and spiritual revelations which shaped the making and beholding of the work. As will be emphasized, these revelations both fostered and hindered the exhibition and dissemination of the artwork.

The title nuances Reitzenstein’s experience of the completed aperture and its contents: this view is a “revelation” that is by definition an interaction between the perceptible and the imperceptible. His excavation effected a visual and cognitive revelation of the previously unseen, unknown, ungrasped, or unapparent.97 Reitzenstein is both the active agent of this disclosure and, according to his interview statements, a receptive subject, or seer, of a spiritual revelation imparted supernaturally.98 During the 1970s, he fashioned his role in the excavated pit of

Revealed Roots as a secular mystic and perceptual prophet. Through downward tunnelling and skyward gazing, he experienced a visual illumination synonymous with a transformative, private, mental revelation. Apertures became portals to interior experience. In an interview with curator

Alvin Balkind from circa 1975, the artist equated the new sights uncovered during his digging with spiritual and intellectual insights. As documented in the curator’s fragmented notes,

Reitzenstein “investigate[s] nature by digging and excavating . . . does it in order to receive a revelation” and “[b]elieves that all artists are naturally religious in that they religiously believe they can expand the realms of perception.” Perceptual enrichment, insisted the artist, amplified the cognitive capacities. This evolution of the human mind depended upon receptivity to spontaneous, unrestricted visual and mental revelations. Balkind paraphrased the artist as affirming that “Playfulness . . . is important . . . don’t close in; open up . . . permit flashes,

97 Oxford English Dictionary, 2010 ed., s.v. “revelation.”

98 Ibid.

265 revelations.”99 Reitzenstein implicitly portrayed the mind “open[ed] up” as a welcoming aperture. During the 1990s, he elaborated upon his subterranean optical revelation as a newfound awareness of human consciousness, the non-rational, and his co-existence with the non-human.

He recollected that the ironwood struck him as a lofty emblem of the “psyche and imagination” in a revelation received while nestled in roots and soil.100 Through this bodily submerging, he also entered, in Grande’s paraphrase of Reitzenstein’s words, “an opening into a world where nature’s life processes create continuous flux and change before, during, and after the artist’s action.”101 By being literally in the site, he accessed personal insights.

His insights inspired and sustained his prior decision to relocate his artistic practice from the studio to the woods in the early 1970s. In overtly biblical terms, Reitzenstein proclaimed that he envisioned “all of creation” as the ideal locus in which to make art,102 conjuring the image of the divine architect creating the universe. To describe his newly adopted working methods,

Reitzenstein employed terms evocative of a spiritual conversion to a new set of ethical principles and way of life encouraged by his arboreal revelations. In the mid-1970s, he explained that he had made a radical “readjustment in working habits,” a “reorientation” in choice of tools, and a

“total environmental switch” from the atelier to the outdoors, in short, a comprehensive “change in attitude and approach” as an artist. He learned to “adapt” physically and mentally to the rigours imposed by working in the outdoors.103 Reitzenstein summed up this artistic conversion and rebirth in the following comments made to Balkind. The artist confessed that, upon visiting

99 Reitzenstein, “Reinhard Reitzenstein,” n.p.

100 Fraser, [Untitled], (includes an interview with Reitenstein), 10.

101 Grande, “. . . Untitling Nature . . . ,” (includes an interview with Reitenstein), 29.

102 Fraser, [Untitled], (includes an interview with Reitzenstein), 17.

103 Reitzenstein, [Untitled], n.p. 266 the forests and First Nations reserves in Northern Ontario in the early 1970s at the outset of his artistic career, he initially “brought city-slicker attitudes with him from Toronto” but “gradually shed them, like a snake skin” as he “started expanding his horizons, his perceptions.”104 In sites such as that of Revealed Roots, he found inspiration and creative outlets for spiritual and artistic self-fashioning.

In Revealed Roots, revelations of the self co-exist with dissimulations and erasures of the site. First, while exposing the roots to himself, he simultaneously withheld them from public viewing. This site proffered private revelations for Reitzenstein, his family, and acquaintances permitted on his family’s property, yet languished in invisibility from the perspective of the art world and general public. His second strategy of concealment and denying access to the work consisted of permanently refilling the aperture under the tree with earth after completing the excavation. Reitzenstein, perhaps inadvertently, heightened the mystery surrounding this artwork by not clarifying the exact date of the cover-up (although Grande dated the filling to 1982).105

This lack of temporal specificity is consistent with his not divulging the time spent on digging.

The series of six photographs of Revealed Roots further mystifies the temporality of the work’s appearance and disappearance. Reitzenstein removed the burrow below the tree from both in situ and photographically mediated sight. As Learn noted in her review of the work in

1975, the images demonstrate an “abrupt” transition from the “before” stage (the state of the site prior to excavation) and the “after” stage in which the work is finished. The intermediary stages and the actual labour are not captured.106 Excavation, the very means of revelation, is itself

104 Reitzenstein, “Reinhard Reitzenstein,” n.p.

105 Reitzenstein, “Earth in Context,” 189. In his review of 17 Canadian Artists , John Noel Chandler assumed that the artist would refill the pit at some “later,” unspecified time; see Chandler, “17 Canadian Artists,” 58.

106 Learn, “Psychic Realism,” 45. 267 effaced. The only image showing the artist working in the pit is the photograph on the Lamanna

Gallery postcard, which was neither usually displayed with the other six photographs at exhibitions nor circulated in catalogues and journals. Unlike NETCo’s Quarter-Mile Landscape or Mackenzie’s 1,2,3,4, Reitzenstein’s Revealed Roots is not represented photographically as a serial, sequential, process-based work. Reitzenstein not only physically removed his work from direct access but also suppressed the work’s temporal progression. He withdrew the apertures from the flow of historical time. The lack of photographs of the site in its final, refilled stage compounds the chronological obscurity of the apertures. Burial signals a mortuary rite for lost visual revelations. The artist’s mystification of the ironwood’s apertures dovetails with Heizer’s desire to make ahistorical holes in his art. Speaking to Guggenheim curator Diane Waldman in the early 1970s, Heizer professed regarding his earth displacements and other desert works that

“I don’t want any indication I’ve been here at all. My holes should have no history, they should be indeterminate in time and inaccessible in locale.”107

Notwithstanding Reitzenstein’s concealing of the site-specific existence of the apertures,

Revealed Roots entered historical time and public space through exhibitions of the six photographs. These images circulated in catalogues and journals that often did not present all six images. Revealed Roots received widespread exposure to Canadian and international audiences during 17 Canadian Artists: A Protean View at the Vancouver Art Gallery from May 31 to July

4, 1976 [figure 61]. Curated by Alvin Balkind, the exhibit showcased the “protean” multiformity and creative “diversity” of recent Canadian art.108 Reitzenstein’s Revealed Roots and Quartz Dig

#1,2,3,4 appeared alongside works by Paterson Ewen, Betty Goodwin, N.E. Thing Co., Michael

107 Diane Waldman, “Holes Without History,” (includes an interview with Michael Heizer), Art News 70 (May 1971): 47.

108 Balkind, “Proem,” n.p. 268

Snow, and Joyce Wieland, amongst others.109 A broad audience of gallery-goers, government officials, activists, and academics would have visited 17 Canadian Artists as the exhibition ran concurrently with HABITAT (May 31-June 11, 1976), the United Nations Conference on Human

Settlements, held in Vancouver. The city also hosted other exhibits and public gatherings in connection with the UN meeting focused on land use, squatters’ settlements, drinking water, pollution, and public transport.110

While Revealed Roots enjoyed a visible, post-refill afterlife in galleries, the ironwood tree produced a felicitous new visual revelation not viewable to the public. Reitzenstein observed that his digging encouraged a prolonged, beneficial aeration of the soil leading to a markedly improved flourishing of leaves upon the filling of the pit.111 In this (undocumented) flowering finale, the tree again contributes to the visual display in the glen. The transformations of the site following the closure of the apertures point to a conceptual and semantic interplay between visibility and invisibility. The artist’s initial manual “uncovering” of the roots lead to his visual

“discovery” of a complex subterranean realm. Reitzenstein’s “re-covering” of the aperture with soil enabled the root system to “recover,” in the sense of “regaining,” its previous invisibility beneath the earth. “Recover” is also an obsolete horticultural term referring to the transferring or transporting of a plant.112 Reitzenstein enacts not a spatial transportation but a visual return of the

109 See the exhibition catalogue 17 Canadian Artists: A Protean View (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1976) and the following review, Chandler, “17 Canadian Artists,” 56-60.

110 The Vancouver Art Gallery exhibit did not directly address or illustrate the issues central to HABITAT. Other events held during HABITAT include the Habitat Forum at Jericho Beach and the Vancouver Symposium; see HABITAT, The United Nations Conference on Human Settlements: Report of the Canadian Delegation (Ottawa: Ministery of State, Urban Affairs, Canada, 1977), 45. Political disagreements over an “anti-Zionist resolution” in HABITAT’s Declaration of Principles forced fifteen countries, including Canada and the United States, to vote “no” on the Declaration. See HABITAT, 74 and Daniel Stoffman, “Habitat Hopes Dashed in Split Over Zionism,” Toronto Star, June 12, 1976, A3.

111 Grande, “. . . Untitling Nature . . . ,” 29.

112 Oxford English Dictionary, 2010 ed., s.v. “recover.” 269 site to its general pre-excavation appearance. Physical “recovering” gave way to the tree’s visible

“recovery” of its health as manifested in its improved flowering. Triple recovery recasts the filling of the pit as the suturing of a wound.

Sacred Loci

Arboreal recovery requires further contextualizing in Reitzenstein’s symbolic healing of trees through the manipulation of perceptible and imperceptible energies in the apertures. Unlike

Trudeau’s call for arboreal amputation, the artist strove to heal tree, earth, and site by channelling invisible supernatural energies via the apertures. Visual revelation and visible signs of recovery manifested in Revealed Roots are, according to the artist’s beliefs, spiritual conditions affected by the occult, the hidden realm of the spirit world, and alchemical transformations. The apertures function as conduits to the otherworldly in a site constructed as the threshold between different layers of reality informed by eclectic cultural references.

Indigenous Canadian healing traditions and ethical perspectives toward the environment are the foundational inspiration for Reitzenstein’s ritual tree therapy through art. He first encountered and dwelled amongst First Nations communities in Northern Ontario between 1970 and 1972, a pivotal moment in his development as an artist and activist.113 Inspired by native traditions, the artist administered treatments to trees as if they were bodies, as in Blessure

[Injury] (1988) in which he placed a poultice of wax on a tree.114 He fleshed out his repertoire of

“traditional healing” methods with casts, moulds, embalming, and peeling.115 These physical

113Reitzenstein, “Reinhard Reitzenstein,” n.p. He joined other artists in the protest against the Reed Paper company during the 1976 Changing Visions exhibition discussed in Chapter Four. On Reitzenstein’s involvement, see Klepac, “The Art of Dissent,” 6.

114 On Blessure, see Fraser, [Untitled], 17, and Dewdney, “Reinhard Reitzenstein,” 6.

115 Derek Knight, “Heart, Limb[,] and Soul,” in Reinhard Reitzenstein: Escarpment, Valley, Desert (Hamilton, ON: Art Gallery of Hamilton, 2002), 22. 270 practices aimed to heal trees through the intervention of the spirit world. Although Reitzenstein created Revealed Roots independently, for other works he frequently consulted and collaborated with First Nations spiritual advisors and healers in rituals and ceremonies to make reparation to the trees from which he would create artworks.116 Such rituals aimed to establish a curative reconciliation between nature, the spirit world, and humans. Reitzenstein’s tree works resonate with certain “Action” works of the 1970s by Joseph Beuys in which the latter, in the words of architectural historian David Adams, “expos[ed] ‘trauma points’ in modern materialistic social life and then effected a symbolic healing” through ritualized, shamanistic performances and installations that aimed to reconcile whites, indigenous peoples, the urban, and the organic.117

In the context of spiritual healing, the apertures of Revealed Roots are conduits channelling invisible, restorative energies coursing through the living tree, and in particular, the venous network of roots. By 1976, Reitzenstein had developed a personal iconography centered upon the potent “life force” and replenishing energies found in forests. He emphasized quartz as an emblem of the life force,118 as exemplified by Quartz Dig # 1, 2, 3 (1975), a series of unearthed pieces of quartz propped on wooden dowels [figures 62, 63].119 Reitzenstein also included quartz in Connections: A Union of Opposites, a mixed-media installation of 1977 at the

Carmen Lamanna Gallery.120 Like the quartz, the ironwood tree embodies revitalization in light of the artist’s spiritual awakening of the era. As reported by Balkind, the artist recalled that he

116 Dewdney, “Reinhard Reitzenstein,” 6.

117 David Adams, “Joseph Beuys: Pioneer of a Radical Ecology,” Art Journal 51 (Summer 1992): 32.

118 Joyce Zemans, “Reinhard Reitzenstein: Carmen Lamanna Gallery March 13-31,” Artscanada 34 (May/June 1977): 44.

119 Reitzenstein’s Quartz Dig bears a striking formal resemblance to Smithson’s Overturned Rock (1969). No evidence, however, confirms that the former knew of the latter’s artwork. For reproductions of Overturned Rock, see Robert Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan,” Artforum (September 1969); reprinted in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 130.

120 Zemans, “Reitzenstein,” 44. 271 had “indulged in animism, spending a night inside the trunk of a tree; similar to Indian ritual of sending young man off into the woods to pick up energy from trees; a tree gives off an aura, regenerates our energies, as do some people.”121 Reitzenstein’s animistic saturation of psychic energies tellingly occurs in an aperture, the hollow inside of a trunk allowing just enough space for his body, much like the pit beneath Revealed Roots.

His eclectic thought mingled invisible restorative arboreal energy with the nourishing viriditas channelled through tree roots. Reitzenstein avowed one of his main inspirations to be the concept of viriditas, as devised by the German Benedictine abbess, mystic, author, and composer Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179). In her writings, viriditas is a theological metaphor, a spiritual phenomenon, and a biological reality defined as a fecund, “green” power. A manifestation of the divine in the physical world, viriditas nourishes plants and the bodies and souls of humans.122 Of particular relevance to Reitzenstein’s art, plants are said to draw viriditas through their roots.123 He explained the role of viriditas in his work as a “greening, healing energy, the grow [sic] energy of the Mother Earth,” 124 and paraphrased von Bingen’s image of this force as potent perspiration oozing from the earth.125 The diverse apertures of Revealed

Roots tap supernatural currents for a restorative tonic prescribed to the site and the artist.

121 Reitzenstein, “Reinhard Reitzenstein,” n.p

122 On the historical, religious, and psychoanalytical significance of viriditas, see Sara Ritchey, “Rethinking the Twelfth-Century Discovery of Nature,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 39:2 (Spring 2009): 232, 243, 246; Avis Clendenen, “Encounter with the Unconscious: Hildegard in Jung,” Jung Journal 3:1 (2009): 43-44.

123 Clendenen, “Encounter with the Unconscious,” 44.

124 Reitzenstein, “Earth in Context,” 190.

125 Ibid., 191. Reitzenstein insisted upon the plurality of cultural references in his art as a “bridge” between multiple ethical and ecological perspectives (ibid., 190). As curator Chris Dewdney observed, the aboriginal ceremonies of reconciliation with trees adhered to by Reitzenstein contain themes of sacrifice and absolution that recall biblical traditions. See Dewdney, “Reinhard Reitzenstein,” 11. 272

Other western spiritual traditions informing Reitzenstein’s occluding of the apertures are more occult in nature, particularly his interest in the role of trees in alchemy, a body of arcane knowledge overlapping magic and proto-chemistry.126 In exhibitions of tree works, the artist has included reproductions of details or altered versions of elaborate arboreal emblems from

Renaissance alchemical manuscripts [figures 64, 65]. Alchemical imagery implicitly informs

Revealed Roots as striking “philosophical trees” abound in medieval and early modern European alchemical treatises as emblematic illustrations of various substances and stages in the transmutation of matter.127 Allusions to alchemy coordinate with ritualized healing and psychic revelation via apertures: the philosophical tree symbolizes both the growth of the philosopher’s stone, the ultimate healing elixir, and the spiritual growth of the alchemist’s psyche.128

Reitzenstein pursued his grappling with invisible occult forces and esoteric insights in forest apertures through two key exhibitions. 17 Canadian Artists: A Protean View, held at the

Vancouver Art Gallery in 1976, regrouped Revealed Roots with other works which curator Alvin

Balkind qualified as preoccupied with private ritual, ceremony, mysticism, hermeticism, and “a wish to vanquish one’s own psychological demons through privately invented exorcistic rites.”129

Reitzenstein continued his role as shaman, magician, and magus, inaugurated by Revealed Roots, in the otherworldly undercurrents of landscape in Connections: A Union of Opposites, exhibited at the Carmen Lamanna Gallery, Toronto, in 1977. The artist explained that the exhibit, which

126 Fraser, [Untitled], (includes an interview with Reitzenstein), 6.

127 Lyndy Abraham, “Philosophical Tree,” in A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 150-151.

128 Ibid., 150.

129 Balkind, “Proem,” n.p. 273 included photographs of performances in outdoor scenery and an installation of a wooden cage, lines of ashes, and life-giving quartz, aimed “to exorcise the dualities of his personality.”130

The ongoing negotiation between the occult and the revealed in the apertures of Revealed

Roots generates a sacred site in which expanded visual capacities are the vehicle for spiritual enrichment. In disclosing a new site through his apertures, Reitzenstein rebutted his Lamanna

Gallery colleague, Robin Mackenzie. The latter commented in the early 1970s that, unlike other societies, contemporary Canada lacked “sacred loci,” special sites “infused with meaning” conveyed by art and inspiring a society’s worldview.131 Through the ironwood work,

Reitzenstein opened a sacred locus of the kind analyzed by historian of art and religion Maureen

Korp. Observing that certain examples of contemporary earthwork art shared formal features of places held sacred by native cultures of North and Central America,132 she argued that some of these artworks might possess “sacred place morphology,” that is, features indicative of loci of concentrated spiritual, even divine, energy.133 Reitzenstein carved out a sacred site in which the invisible, the occluded, the deferred, and the intangible play equal parts with the artwork’s physical morphology in revelation and regeneration.

Disappearing Acts

Reitzenstein assumed various curative roles in orchestrating the site’s visibility: radical arboriculturalist, mystic, healer, alchemist, and negative sculptor. The artist’s affirmation of his physical presence leads me now to examine his body as performer, probe, and occupant of the

130 Zemans, “Reitzenstein,” (includes a paraphrase of an interview with Reitzenstein), 44.

131 “Sculpture: A Rebirth of Humanism,” (includes comments by Robin Mackenzie), Artscanada 31 (Autumn 1974): 48.

132 Maureen Korp, Sacred Art of the Earth: Ancient and Contemporary Earthworks (New York: Continuum, 1997), 129.

133 Ibid., 85, 95, 99, 129 . 274 site as captured in select photographs. His presence embodies the theme of visual display as he makes up much of the content revealed by the chasm. Through his appearance, gestures, and modes of beholding, the artist vividly exhibits and subtly obliterates himself.134

Through his apparel, tools, pose, and general self-presentation in the photograph on the

Lamanna Gallery postcard [figure 50], Reitzenstein constructs an ambiguous persona. Donning a brimmed hat and brandishing a trowel, he performs the roles of ersatz archaeologist or paleontologist meticulously excavating the material accumulation of the site’s history. Learn designated Revealed Roots and the Quartz Dig series as an artist’s “archaeotectural fieldwork.”135 Yet, his domed, narrow-brimmed hat also resembles the iconic pith or safari helmets worn by 19th-century European colonialist military personnel or explorers as well as the hard hats of 20th-century construction workers or miners. Staring determinedly from the lip of the burrow while clenching a root in one hand and a shovel in the other, he also presents himself as a desperate fugitive boring the proverbial hole to the other side of the earth or clawing his way to the surface. His appearance casts him not as the benevolent tree-doctor but in the dubious roles of intruder, exploiter, even convict, potential threats to the exposed, vulnerable site.

Reitzenstein extenuates this potential assault by surrendering his vulnerable body to the site. Self-revelation occurs through perilous self-exposure. To Balkind he proclaimed his desire

“to have nature impose itself on him.”136 The artist’s poetry of the early to mid-1970s expresses

134 My approach therefore diverges from Nick Kaye’s emphasis on the body of the performance artist as a “place” in itself; see Kaye, Site-Specific Art, 151-163. This section’s argument also departs from Amanda Boetzkes’s analysis of earth artists’ exploration of the body as a perceptual limit; see Boetzkes, The Ethics of Earth Art, 47-57, 145-179.

135 Learn, “Psychic Realism,” 42. On the influence of archaeology, anthropology, and ethnography on land art and earthworks of the 1970s, see Edward Lucie-Smith, Art in the Seventies (Oxford: Phaidon, 1980), 104-109; Lippard, “Art Outdoors,” 87; and Lucy R. Lippard, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983).

136 Reitzenstein, “Reinhard Reitzenstein,” n.p. 275 his yielding of physical well-being to outdoor hazards. An untitled brief stanza recounts that he

“found strength” during the “magnificent event” of “sitting in the midst of a thunder storm.”

Another untitled short poem captures his mounting fear and “the sudden rush of anxiety at every untraceable noise” experienced while “Alone in some remote region.”137 Descending into the earth for Revealed Roots, the artist offers his body to the unstable tree and earthen walls of the pit. Seeking neither shelter nor prospect, he tests his endurance and composure.

Displaying himself in a site that threatens him with concealment by burial, the artist implicates his body in the continuous interplay between visibility and invisibility in the apertures of Revealed Roots. The tree and the pit as depicted in the postcard appear to engulf the artist in retaliation for his intrusion and in fulfilment of his voluntary surrender. However, this engulfment in the aperture vividly re-displays the artist as diminished from a body to mere parts.

Reitzenstein is reduced to a severed head, a right hand, and a left forearm caught in the roots like so many excavated artefacts or scattered human remains uncovered by a forensic anthropologist.

The artist plays both archaeologist-subject and excavated object, agent of revelation and view revealed. His performance captured on the postcard merges intruder with victim. On one hand, the artist gouges the earth with what critic Ted Rettig called a “spoon.” Rettig’s term implicitly portrays Reitzenstein as a hungry geophagist. On the other, the image shows the cartoon-like scenario of the artist as morsels on the tines of fork-like roots above a gaping maw, a fly caught in a spider web, or the prey of a giant hand plunged in the earth.

Absorbed by the aperture, the artist stages his physical merging with the site. He becomes a human taproot or, in line with alchemical and occult references, a large mandrake (a poisonous plant with roots shaped like a human body which was used in medieval and early modern Europe

137 Reitzenstein, untitled poems, early to mid-1970s, in Carmen Lamanna Gallery at The Owens Art Gallery, n.p. 276 for magical spells and aphrodisiacs) [figure 66].138 His bodily submission to the site is additionally suggestive of an erotic union with an aperture that then incubates him. Ted Fraser interpreted tree roots in Reitzenstein’s art as symbolic of genitals and culturally repressed sexuality.139 Fraser’s point is pertinent to Reitzenstein’s performance as an example of what art historian Tonia Raquejo referred to as male land artists’ propensity to “sexualize landscape” by physically merging their bodies with sites. She cited Arnatt’s Self-Burial (1969),140 in which the artist’s entire upright body gradually descends into the ground. Other examples include the naked

Alan Sonfist wrapping his arms around tree trunks in the series of photographed performances

Myself Becoming One with the Tree (1969),141 or the unclad Charles Simonds’s sensual immersion in, and exit from, the earth in his film Birth (1970).142

While the Lamanna Gallery postcard captures Reitzenstein’s brush with invisibility through absorption and burial in the earthen aperture, another photograph portrays the diminishing of his visible corporeal presence through evaporation or erasure in the woods. This second image appears on a postcard advertising Works Recent and Not So Recent, a 1975 solo

138 Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud, “Mandrake,” in A Dictionary of English Folklore, Oxford University Press, 2003, http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780198607663.001.0001/acref-9780198607663- e-641. Also see Alan W. Cuthbert, “Mandrake, or Mandragora, or Satan’s Apple,” in The Oxford Companion to the Body, ed. Colin Blakemore and Sheila Jennett, Oxford University Press, 2003, http://www.oxfordreference.com /view/10.1093/acref/9780198524038.001.0001/acref-9780198524038-e-594. According to folklore, the scream uttered by a mandrake upon being uprooted would inflict insanity or death. Hence, dogs were assigned to uproot the plant. See Simpson and Roud, “Mandrake” and Cuthbert, “Mandrake.”

139 Fraser, [Untitled], 33.

140 Tonia Raquejo, Land Art, 4th ed. (Madrid: Nerea, 2008), 26-27.

141 Sonfist, Nature the End of Art, 42-50.

142 Charles Simonds, “Microcosm to Macrocosm/Fantasy World to Real World,” Artforum (February 1974): 36.

277 exhibition at the Forest City Gallery in London, Ontario [figure 67].143 This untitled image was part of a series of photographs of forest scenes on display.144 Both postcards juxtapose the enhanced visibility of a tree-filled site with the obscured visible presence of the artist. The Works

Recent image contributes to the visual inquiries of Revealed Roots with the notable distinction of employing primarily optical, rather than sculptural or performative, strategies to stage the artist’s partial vanishing. Reitzenstein exploited photographic effects, namely, contrasting degrees of visual definition, sharpness, and lighting. The artist stands at the left in the Works Recent image of which the rest depicts a boscage. Occupying nearly half of the photograph, he looms before the camera as a figure both blatantly visible and yet difficult to see. The camera captures a highly out-of-focus, bust-length portrait of a bareheaded Reitzenstein in a buttoned shirt and jacket.

Defying conventional representations of scenery and human figures, the bearded blur hovers like a disembodied apparition in front of spindly, leafless trees displayed in crisp detail. The image also makes explicit the contrast between the qualities of light illuminating body and site. The smudgy forms of the artist’s truncated body and face softly radiate an eerie glow while his eyes recede into shadowy sockets. In contrast, a harsh, bright sunlight sharply defines the mesh of prickly branches and twigs. The trees cast neat, horizontal black shadows that jab across the ground at right. Although these effects occur within a photograph, the contrasts between the two halves of the image evoke different visual media. Reitzenstein’s vaguely defined visage resembles a painterly, impressionistic watercolour or a semi-erased pencil drawing superimposed on a documentary film still or photograph of a forest. The body marks a blind-spot aperture within the visual field of the photograph. His body registers a dramatic reduction of visibility and

143 Postcard announcing a solo exhibition of Reinhard Reitzenstein, Works Recent and Not So Recent, at the Forest City Gallery, London, Ontario, October 25-November 12, 1975, Reitzenstein, Reinhard 1949—Doc/Ca, Artist File, Library and Archives of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

144 Smedor, “Around London,” 61, 63. 278 tangibility—a display of self-effacement. His presence opens a zone akin to an aperture that introduces a discordant, anomalous anti-view, a rent in the spatial continuity and light of the site.

Conceiving the body as an aperture also illuminates the image’s disruption of the typical spatial relationship between figure and ground in a landscape representation. The figure of the artist is not solidly anchored in scenery serving as a backdrop or container. His position in relation to the trees eludes precise determination as he does not appear to occupy physically the site but rather floats like a mirage at some distance in front of, or even outside of, the fortress of pike-like trees. Despite his proximity to the camera, his appearance is consistent with that of a distant form represented in a painting according to the conventions of atmospheric or aerial perspective. Such perspective creates the illusion of distance through softened, indistinct contours, decreased colour intensity, and bluish tones. In the Forest City Gallery photograph,

Reitzenstein is diluted into a washed-out, atmospheric rendering usually reserved for clouds, water, or distant landscape features, such as the foggy, damp coastal scenery permeating Ellis’s works and the misty, amorphous lakeside prospect captured in the final stage of Mackenzie’s

1,2,3,4. Through his compromised visibility, Reitzenstein’s body approximates a ground or backdrop. Meanwhile, the literal ground—the wooded site—presents qualities associated with a human figure. Such qualities surpass the basic morphological similarities between the trunks and limbs of human anatomy and those of trees. These trees exude a commanding visual and affective presence upstaging that of the human body. They form a band of bristling, forbidding, tangible figures. Through inversion, the artist becomes the ground for the figures of the trees.

As a corollary to the diminished visibility of the artist’s bodily presence, apertures in the

Forest City Gallery postcard suggest that body’s inability or refusal to see the site in a focused, directed manner. Whereas the Lamanna Gallery postcard captured the artist staring intensely at 279 the camera (and therefore, at the viewer), the Forest City Gallery postcard captures him with an ambiguous countenance. Seemingly in mid-reverie, he looks askance with a single, barely visible eye. The object of this monocular viewing remains unknown. Perhaps a private revelation has suspended his normal vision. It is noteworthy that this murky eye socket is an aperture aligned horizontally with another aperture in the form of a dark, distant hollow amongst the sunlit trees at the right. Shadowy eye and gloomy hollow create a visual echo. This photograph further establishes a triadic relationship of compromised sight: the viewer of the photograph cannot clearly see Reitzenstein, the artist appears not to view the site, and the dark recess at right offers nothing to see amidst otherwise highly visible trees. The apertures within the image foster a purposely irresolvable dissonance of visible and invisible complementing that of Revealed Roots.

Following the preceding images from circa 1975 and 1976, the artist developed new apertures with which to depict both the loss of his body’s visibility and his visual disengagement from his woodsy surroundings. The pairing of peephole vista and vegetal screen initiated by

Revealed Roots recurs in a different guise in a photograph from the mixed-media series

Connections: A Union of Opposites (1976-1977) [figure 68]. This six-foot wide, sepia-toned image in an unusual circular format145 depicts the artist sitting naked in the woods. In keeping with his eclecticism, this two-dimensional aperture evokes a monumental version of the roundels and tondi of Renaissance art and architecture, circular and ovoid portrait miniatures, the vistas contained by Holt’s locators, and a view of the naked Nils-Udo curled up in The Nest. An arboreal screen of slender, overlapping tree trunks and sparsely foliaged branches dominates the quiet, moody scenery in the Connections aperture. Across the lower third of the image spreads a thick carpet of autumn leaves. The small, rounded form of the artist sits on the ground with head bowed, shoulders hunched forward, and knees drawn up to his chest. Critic Joyce Zemans,

145 Zemans, “Reitzenstein,” 44. 280 reviewing the exhibition of Connections in 1977, interpreted this work as “bespeak[ing] contemplation and introspection.” She wrote that his rounded posture mimicked not only the circularity of the photograph but also performed “the human body’s ability to echo the attitude and mood of the natural environment.”146 However, he also manipulates his own visibility through this performance. He presents his vulnerable bare body to the camera, the autumn chill, and any lurking animals. Although exposed, he also hides immobile like prey framed in the round lens of a telescope or hunter’s rifle. His tightly crouched position ensures that he is nearly lost amongst the tall trees and overall visual complexity of his surroundings. Forcibly collapsing his body, the artist appears to impress himself on or into the ground. At first glance, the huddled form resembles a boulder or tree stump. The monochrome sepia scheme further camouflages the body. Reitzenstein blends in as a pale patch amongst others in the mesh of trunks and boughs.

Meanwhile, his foetal pose and downcast face convey the withdrawal of his sight from his surroundings. In a state of mental activity or concentrated gazing upon the ground, he immerses himself in a private view withheld from the beholder of the photograph.

The bodily absorption and partial vanishing of the body in the apertures of Revealed

Roots and other photographed performances in forests of the mid-1970s require contextualizing in Reitzenstein’s conception of the invisible continuities between bodies and sites. Such pre- existing connections enable, and are manifested by, his physical merging with sites. Reitzenstein held that language and Western epistemology imposed artificial, reductive distinctions between bodies and sites. Contrary to “these so-called separations,” he argued that “There is no separation between the inside [of the body] and the outside [of the body and its surroundings].”147 He

146 Ibid., 44.

147 Reitzenstein, “Earth in Context,” 194.

281 pointed to scientific research on microorganisms to demonstrate that the body, populated by myriad colonies of bacteria and flora, has an internal landscape. The body, in turn, occupies external sites that are also homes to fauna and flora. These two kinds of sites, he claimed, do not merely co-exist but are biological and spiritual “extension[s]” of one another according to his interpretation of indigenous conceptions of the indivisibility of human bodies and land.148 The artist’s emphasis on the spiritual resonance between trees and people is implicit in previously discussed comments made by Reitzenstein regarding the analogous auras and revitalizing energies exuded by trees and humans,149 and his healing of trees as if they were bodies.

Reitzenstein’s ideas are in sympathy with Beuys’s belief that trees possess intelligence and experience suffering,150 and Sonfist’s avowal that trees have souls and communicative powers.151

Revealed Roots displays the physical integration and mutual identification of body with site.

Family Trees

Transitioning from photographic documentation of Reitzenstein’s bodily union with the woods, I conclude this chapter by uncovering his implicit presence in photographs of Revealed

Roots in which he is physically absent. Due to his emphasis on the corporeal and spiritual indivisibility of bodies and sites, the completed apertures are infused with his psychic presence.

The visible artwork and its site represent the artist. In Revealed Roots, the site conveys a self- portrait and the apertures a symbolic autobiography.152

148 Ibid, 194.

149 Reitzenstein, “Reinhard Reitzenstein,” n.p.

150 Adams, “Joseph Beuys,” 30.

151 Alan Sonfist, “Natural/Cultural: Alan Sonfist,” interview by John K. Grande, in Art Nature Dialogues: Interviews with Environmental Artists (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004), 167.

152 While the artist has not specified this reading of Revealed Roots, he has nonetheless acknowledged the autobiographical content of much of his work with trees. Regarding this point, see Alexandria Pierce, 282

The title of the artwork and the six photographs construct the site as subject despite the non-depiction of Reitzenstein in the images. The double “R” initials of the title echo the name of the work’s maker. Furthermore, the angling and range of depth in the photographs subtly evoke portrait formats. The first image, the sole vertical one, captures the tree from a distance, portraying it as a figure dominating its surroundings in a full-length portrait. The upright photograph was displayed on the far left of the series at the Carmen Lamanna Gallery in the winter of 1975153 and at 17 Canadian Artists in 1976 [figure 64]. The subsequent five photographs depict closer, horizontal views. Four of the six images show the ironwood from one general vantage point slightly shifted in each image as evidenced by the altered angles of the roots and background details. This angular variation creates the effect of a series of frontal, profile, and three-quarter portraits.

The artist’s exposure of arboreal roots also punningly references his self-perception as a geographically “uprooted European”154 (he arrived to Canada from Germany in 1956 at about age seven.155) For Reitzenstein, art became a means by which to connect with his adopted land.156 He consequently became perhaps the most spatially rooted of his clan, becoming “the first Reitzenstein in generations to avoid quadrennial itinerancy.”157 Revealed Roots is the

“LANDeSCAPES: Simon Frank and Reinhard Reitzenstein,” (includes a paraphrase of an interview with Reitzenstein), in LANDeSCAPES: Simon Frank and Reinhard Reitzenstein (Hamilton, ON: McMaster Museum of Art, 2005), 11.

153 Learn, “Psychic Realism,” 42.

154 Rettig, “Contextualizing,” (includes a paraphrase of an interview with Reitzenstein), 33.

155 New Landscapes (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1974), 10.

156 Rettig, “Contextualizing,” (includes a paraphrase of an interview with Reitzenstein), 33-34.

157 Pierce, “LANDeSCAPES,” (includes a paraphrase of an interview with Reitzenstein), 11. Although devoted to his adopted country, he dismissed nationalism as “a restriction of the flow of ideas” and as “incest.” See Reitzenstein, “Reinhard Reitzenstein,” n.p.

283 symbolic and physical rooting of the self into the Ontarian earth that would become the primary creative locus throughout his career. Numerous locales provided materials and settings for his tree works: London in the early 1970s, McDonald’s Corners in the middle of that decade,158 and later, the woods near Grimsby,159 and the Niagara Escarpments.160 His self-planting in Revealed

Roots commemorates his growth into one of the “trees of society,” to quote Armand

Vaillancourt’s metaphor for artists,161 an expression emphasizing the artist’s role as yielding fruit nourishing the well-being of society. Revealed Roots relates a condensed Künstlerroman or

“artist-novel” portraying an artist’s development and attainment of maturity and mastery.

The ironwood-artist is also the successor to an unseen, spatially and temporally removed ersatz tree-self. In the early 1970s, the artist learned that his parents had planted an oak “in his name” in Germany when he was an infant.162 His European arboreal roots resurfaced at age fourteen when he first became engrossed by the visual motif of the “lone tree,”163 also an iconic figure of the Canadian landscape painting tradition. The chronological and geographical origins of rooted oak and deracinated artist are intertwined. The Canadian ironwood work of the mid-

1970s is a companion piece to the German oak planted in the 1950s in a symbolic double self- portrait of the artist. Through Revealed Roots, he adopted multiple strategies of self-effacement as a means of self-revelation.

158 Reitzenstein, “Reinhard Reitzenstein,” n.p.

159 Dewdney, “Reinhard Reitzenstein,” 7.

160 John K. Grande, “Toronto: Reinhard Reitzenstein Olga Korper Gallery,” Sculpture 22 (April 2003): 83.

161 “Vaillancourt has Evangelical Fervor,” (includes an interview with Armand Vaillancourt), Globe and Mail (Toronto), October 2, 1965, 23.

162 Reitzenstein, “Reinhard Reitzenstein,” n.p

163 Knight, “Heart, Limb[,] and Soul,” 25. 284

The digging of the aperture is also the unearthing of a family history embodied in plant- filled sites having a formative impact on Reitzenstein’s artistic development. For the artist, speaking of his works with trees called to mind the apple trees that his great-grandfather grew in

Russia.164 He also reminisced about visiting his grandmother’s garden in Germany: “‘I would pass through a wall or gate into an incredible tangle, a dense intermingling of flowers, bushes, trees, and herbs, and their accompanying, lingering aromas, . . . . [The garden] was also a shelter and a solace.’”165 His description of the garden evocatively recalls specific features of the aperture beneath Revealed Roots.166 Reitzenstein fuses arboreal self-representation with written and spoken autobiographical narratives in which he constructs himself through sites, images, and sensorial experiences pertaining to trees and plants. His revelation of the ironwood’s roots is also a meditation on multiple histories and temporalities: annual tree growth and seasonal flowering, protracted digging, an individual’s life and career, early memories, genealogy, and episodes of itinerancy, migration, and travel. A self-portrait on family property, Revealed Roots grows in an orchard of family trees.

164 Grande, “. . . Untitling Nature . . .,” (includes a paraphrase of a lecture by Reitzenstein), 32.

165 Fraser, [Untitled], (includes an interview with Reitzenstein), 17.

166 Reitzenstein’s garden memories also resonate with Alan Sonfist’s recollections of his childhood “sanctuary” and “magical cathedral,” a forest by the Bronx River where he sought refuge from inner city gang violence. See Sonfist, “Natural/Cultural,” 166. 285

CHAPTER FIVE: FIGURES 48-68

Images were removed due to copyright restrictions.

Figure 49. Reinhard Reitzenstein, Revealed Roots (detail of third photograph of the series), 1975. Reproduced in Beth Learn, “Reinhard Reitzenstein: Psychic Realism—The Terms of Natural Equivalence,” Queen Street Magazine 3:2, February 1977, 44. 286

Figure 50. Reitzenstein during the making of Revealed Roots, 1975. Photographer unknown. Postcard announcing an unnamed solo exhibition of Reinhard Reitzenstein at the Carmen Lamanna Gallery, Toronto, March 13-April 1, 1976, Reitzenstein, Reinhard 1949—Doc/Ca, Artist File, Library and Archives of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

Figure 51. Albrecht Dürer, The Great Piece of Turf (Das große Rasenstück), 1503. Watercolour. 42.8 cm × 31.5 cm. Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna.

287

Figure 52. Tom Thomson, Northern River (detail), 1914-15. Oil on canvas. 114.3 cm x 101.6 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

Figure 53. J.E.H. MacDonald, The Tangled Garden, 1916. Oil on beaverboard. 121.4 cm x 152.4 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. 288

Figure 56. Reinhard Reitzenstein, Revealed Roots (detail, upside down), 1975.

291

293

295

CONCLUSION. TARGETED TERRAIN: THE SITE-INSCRIPTIONS OF BILL VAZAN, 1977-1980

Inscribed Sites

“It seems to me now,” reflected theorist Paul Virilio in 1996, “that land art was the last great figure of an art of inscription, before the total delocalization of art in virtual reality.”1 He elaborated that since prehistory, artists had inscribed their works on matter in particular sites.

Inscription was the basis of the “grounded localization” of art in general and land art—intended for “a territorial body”—in particular.2 Localization, he continued, was “threatened”3 with the

“delocalization” resulting from telecommunications technology, virtual reality, and cyberspace.4

One may extricate from Virilio a concept of site specificity generally applicable to the visually oriented sites of land art. His emphasis on land artworks as physically localized inscriptions underscores this art form’s inherent appeal to an embodied subject beholding visible markers, traces, and patterns on the surface of the earth. Reading these inscriptions requires an extended viewing of the here and now impacted by changing bodily locations, weather, and terrain. In

Canada, the “localized” viewing of an “art of inscription” upon land surfaces is synonymous with the art of Montreal-based Bill Vazan (b. 1933, Toronto). Since the 1960s, he has drawn lines, paths, spirals, and mazes on sand, earth, grass, snow, rocks, and in water (such as the

1 Paul Virilio,“The Dark Spot of Art,” interview by Catherine David, in Virilio Live: Selected Interviews, ed. John Armitage, trans. Brian Holmes (1996; repr., London: Sage Publications, 2001), 129.

2 Ibid., 131.

3 Ibid., 142.

4 Ibid., 128-129. 296 previously discussed sight-orienting inscriptions of Canada in Parentheses, Stone Maze, and

Bridge).5

As the connective thread coursing throughout this study, Vazan’s art is now the focal point at which the trajectories of preceding chapters intersect. Following the lines and loops of his inscriptions, I return to this dissertation’s central argument that land artists created viewing devices to produce a crisis in the concept of site: such works manipulated sight to form elusive, intangible, unfixed, contradictory sites. I address a lesser-known Vazan land artwork, Hot Spots

Shot (1977-1980), to complete the decade under analysis and present a microcosm of the diverse physical settings, views, viewing devices, and models of site of NETCo, Ellis, Mackenzie, and

Reitzenstein. Through Vazan’s artwork, I review the central argument, issues, and aims of this study. Rather than condensing the definition of land art to a single descriptive statement, this conclusion encapsulates the contextual definition of land art proposed in Chapter One by identifying the main formal characteristics and defining themes of land art in addition to the aims, strategies, and contributions of Canadian land artists working from the late 1960s to the late 1970s. Finally, Vazan’s winding inscriptions lead to a reconsideration of Virilio’s conception of localized land art.

Site Typology

The first characteristic shared by Canadian land artists is their preference for physically localizing their works in hybrid, liminal, and (usually) publicly accessible settings. Vazan inscribed Hot Spots Shot on a striking terrain merging elements of the sites selected by his contemporaries. Akin to Ellis’s and Mackenzie’s installation of viewfinders on the water’s edge of Hornby Island and Loch Awe, respectively, Vazan inscribed his work on the grass of the Cité

5 His prolific oeuvre also includes photographic montages and mapping, documentation, and correspondence artworks. On Vazan’s conceptual art, see Bill Vazan: Walking into the Vanishing Point (Montreal: Vox, Centre de l’image contemporaine, 2009). 297 du Havre, a narrow peninsula jutting out from the island of Montreal into the St. Lawrence

River. This site is a juncture of land and water, city and suburbs. From May 30 to June 1, 1980,

Vazan and his assistants painted a series of monumental, ephemeral patterns measuring 110 metres by 615 metres in a mixture of non-metallic paint and white chalk designed to last for a few weeks [figure 69].6 The work accompanied Vazan’s retrospective exhibition of his works at the nearby Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art in 1980.7 Six large white spots, each nested amidst thick, concentric, broken white rings, span a lengthy stretch of the artificial peninsula in a

Québécois counterpart to the linear walkway and terminal spiral of Smithson’s Spiral Jetty.8

Vazan’s circles begin at the Pointe de la Cité du Havre, the tip of the land mass, and sweep across the eponymously named park. This chain of rings forms a “passage” as defined by Krauss and analyzed in relation to the circuits traced by Mackenzie’s string and stones. Vazan’s work also conjoins those intermediary zones privileged by NETCo: the roadside sites between highway and field. The giant chalk rings flank the boomerang-shaped turn at which Pierre Dupuy

Avenue becomes the Concorde Bridge bound south toward St. Helen’s Island. Meanwhile, trees dot the peripheries and centres of the Hot Spots like darts on a target in a variation of the centre- periphery dynamic animating Reitzenstein’s arboreal apertures in the glen. Whereas the latter revealed a root-screen vista expanding laterally and downward, Vazan’s work incorporates the upright vegetal screen of the trees lining the southern edge of the peninsula and cropping the

6 Minister of Cultural Affairs, Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, Communiqué, “Bill Vazan à l’oeuvre au Museé d’art contemporain,” May 28, 1980, 1, Bill Vazan documentation file, 002707, Médiathèque, Museum of Contemporary Art, Montreal.

7 See the exhibition catalogue, Bill Vazan: Suites photographiques recentes et oeuvres sur le terrain (Montreal: Ministère des affaires culturelles, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 1981). After being displayed in Montreal in 1980, the exhibit travelled throughout 1981 to the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Norman MacKenzie Art Gallery of the University of Regina, and the Art Gallery of Windsor. Near Hot Spots Shot, Vazan executed another chalk drawing series, Cité du Havre Digs (1978-1979), that lined the traces of Celtic, Algonquin, and Expo ’67 structures. (ibid., 67).

8 Vazan did not explicitly refer to Smithson’s work as an influence. 298 largest chalk circle. The artist extended the final circles to a place embodying the inversion of the exhibition context of Reitzenstein’s Revealed Roots. Whereas Reitzenstein’s work was shown in conjunction with the HABITAT ’76 conference dealing with squatters’ settlements, Vazan encroached upon Habitat ’67, the futuristic, modular dwellings designed by Canadian architect

Moshe Safdie for the high-tech extravaganza of Expo ’67. The Cité du Havre, near the city’s Old

Port, was one of three sites of Expo ’67 for which pavilions and gardens had been built.9

Reviewing Devices

In addition to their shared site preferences, Canadian land artists are united in their creation of artworks functioning as viewing devices that produce new sites in a broader environment. I refer to Vazan’s chalk drawings as “site-inscriptions” that fuse the forms and modes of sight of the three viewing devices examined in this study: frames, viewfinders, and apertures. These inscriptions are concentric frames that bound and set off portions of turf, a visual effect evident in the artist’s aerial photographs. On the subject of framing, anthropologist

Paul Heyer referred to Vazan’s chalk drawings as “ritual demarcation[s]” that bring particular sites into view and imbue them with meaning.10 The sequential organization of the work invites the mobile serial viewing elicited by NETCo’s framing devices.

The chalk inscriptions also comprise viewfinders insofar as they are geometric configurations that delimit particular views while also enabling the beholder to examine the areas outside of the viewing device. However, Vazan’s fixed, large-scale drawings lack the portability

9 On the history of this location, see « Cité du Havre, » Base de données sur le patrimoine, Grand répertoire du patrimoine bâti de Montréal, revised June 4, 2007, http://patrimoine.ville.montreal.qc.ca/inventaire/fiche_zone. php?batiment=ou&id=1142.

10 Paul Heyer, “Cosmography in a New Context,” in Bill Vazan: Suites photographiques recentes et oeuvres sur le terrain (Montreal: Ministère des affaires culturelles, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 1981), 30. Heyer viewed Vazan’s land art drawings and other works on the ground as extensions of the artist’s early paintings on canvas (ibid., 24).

299 defining the viewfinders of Ellis and Mackenzie. His inscriptions nonetheless accord with previously examined artworks by structuring sightlines across different paths, akin to

Mackenzie’s twine, while the large white bull’s-eyes at the centre of the rings provide visual focus points, as do the rocks of Mackenzie’s work. Meanwhile, the spatial subdivisions of the curvilinear schema overlaid by the rings on the grass complement the quadrangular latticework overlaid by Ellis on water and sky.

The third type of viewing device, the aperture, emerges in a symbolic, pictorial mode in

Vazan’s work in distinction from the burrows, punctures, and cavities embedded physically in the site of Reitzenstein’s artwork. Akin to the latter’s excavation of the hidden, Vazan explained that his inscriptions exposed multiple, sometimes contrasting, “horizons,” here defined as distinct strata of soil.11 Far from disclosing personal and transcultural family history as in his colleague’s forest apertures, Vazan’s apertures mapped local geological history. Hot Spots Shot inscribed the traces of local earthquakes.12 The spots are epicentres of tectonic activity resounding through the shattered rings. These white hot spots also represent erupting apertures: the artist devised the work as a “model for volcanic plug activity in the Monteregian chain across Southern Québec.”13

While Reitzenstein reveals, Vazan condenses a provincial region into a small peninsula.

Sight, Site, Body, Technology, Identity

The effects of viewing devices upon the beholder’s perceptions of sites culminate with the central argument of this dissertation regarding Canadian land artists’ deliberate destabilizing of physical sites by eradicating their commonly presumed fixity in time and space, their

11 Lise Lamarche, “Sans titre,” (includes references to an interview with Bill Vazan), in Bill Vazan: Suites photographiques recentes et oeuvres sur le terrain (Montreal: Ministère des affaires culturelles, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 1981), 22n.

12 Communiqué, (includes a paraphrase of statements by Vazan), 2.

13 Bill Vazan, Bill Vazan: Suites photographiques recentes et oeuvres sur le terrain (Montreal: Ministère des affaires culturelles, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 1981), 63. 300 boundaries, and internal coherence. Three characteristics define Canadian land art as postulated in Chapter One (to which a later section in this conclusion will add four more features): (a) land artworks elicit varying degrees of embodied sight, (b) technology mediates the beholding and documentation of land artworks, and (c) the construction and perception of the sites of land art are underpinned by issues of identity.

The site-inscriptions of Hot Spots Shot encourage an appreciation of the visual distortions and perspectival illusions derived from embodied, peripatetic viewing. To the viewer on the ground, Vazan’s circles and curves flatten into ovals and straightened paths, similar to the geometric perspectival manipulations of Dibbets and Long discussed in Chapter Three. The

“territorial” viewer treading on a “grounded” work, to employ Virilio’s terms, can only catch partial views of the entire work. Vazan explained that “[s]eeing consists of points of focus—the brain, abhorring a vacuum, does the rest.”14 His chalk markings thus partake in the manipulation of sight and cognition at the centre of Ellis’s orchestration of optical illusions manipulating depth perception and Eurocentric perspectival conventions to create illusory, contradictory, logically impossible views for upright, stationary viewers. Hot Spots Shot also resonates with Mackenzie’s choreography of extended, piecemeal viewing across myriad sightlines to devise a model of process-based, mutable sites with shifting boundaries.

Although all of the land artists used technology to document their works, Vazan’s implicit appeal to sight mediated by transportation technology establishes a close relation between his site-inscriptions and the roadside viewing of NETCo. The Baxters constructed intangible, passing, mobile roadside views perceived via the windows of cars and staked off by signs. The sprawling Hot Spots Shot addressed motorists on the Concorde Bridge who

14 Bill Vazan, “A Conversation Between Patrice Loubier and Bill Vazan, August 29, 2008,” interview by Patrice Loubier, in Bill Vazan: Walking into the Vanishing Point (Montreal: Vox, Centre de l’image contemporaine, 2009), 130. 301 experienced the framed, vehicular, cinematic serial viewing explored by NETCo. Cyclists eyed the work while travelling the path through the park while other viewers could appreciate the chalk drawings from vessels at the Old Port. Vazan enjoyed a panoramic, bird’s-eye-view of his finished chalk drawings through the window of a small aircraft. His striking aerial photographs offer a complete, unified, pictorial view in contrast with the durational, incomplete viewing by beholders on the site. The artist subjected his art to the remote surveillance of archeological and military aerial photography, a form of visual perspective to which accrues an ever-increasing body of art historical scholarship.15 The historical specificity (and potential obsolescence) of technologically mediated views also surfaces in land art. Commentators of the late 1960s pointed to the imminent demise of the ubiquitous car culture and therefore of roadside viewing. For

Vazan, the chalk site-inscriptions mark a transitional moment. He claimed that the “aerial view” that dominated the Western worldview by the mid-20th century was giving way to the expanded visual scope of late 20th-century “planetary probes” afforded by space travel and satellites.16

In addition to embodied and technologically mediated sight, the third characteristic defining Canadian land art is its set of ambivalent responses to the issue of identity. Ellis,

15 Heyer explains Vazan’s chalk drawings as “a play on recent aerial archaeological methods . . . [that use] infrared photography, oblique lighting . . . , varied vegetation growth [,] and surface contours viewed from a distance.” See Heyer, “Cosmography,” 31. Heyer juxtaposed reproductions of Vazan’s works with aerial photographs and diagrams from the late 1960s and 1970s depicting Bronze Age, Celtic, and medieval ruins, as well as the Nazca lines and First World War trenches (ibid., 26, 27, 30). From the expanding literature on aerial photography, see the following (by no means exhaustive) list of references: Mary Chan, “The Conquest of the Air,” in ModernStarts: People, Places, Things, eds. John Elderfield, Peter Reed, Mary Chan, Maria Del Carmen González (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999), 252-257; Margret Dreikhausen, Aerial Perception: The Earth as Seen From Aircraft and Spacecraft and Its Influence on Contemporary Art (Toronto: Toronto Associated University Presses, 1985); Janna Eggebeen, “ ‘Between Two Worlds’: Robert Smithson and Aerial Art,” Public Art Dialogue 1 (March 2011): 87-111; Tom Holert, “Media Land Art’s Multiple Sites,” in Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, organized by Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon, trans. ElizabethTucker (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2012), 100-102; Joy Sleeman, “Land Art and the Moon Landing,” Journal of Visual Culture 8:3 (2009): 299-328; Robert Smithson, “Aerial Art,” Studio International (April 1969): 180-181.

16 James D. Campbell, “A Cosmic Dance,” (includes an interview with Bill Vazan), in Bill Vazan, A Cosmic Dance: Thunderstones, Wererocks and Shamanic Drawings 1987-1992 (Kingston, ON: Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University, 1993), 30. 302

Mackenzie, and Reitzenstein participated in various forms of political activism in defence of local sites and regional identities. They further acknowledged the history of ongoing conflicts between native peoples and Euro-Canadians. Reitzenstein infused his art with his personal cultural identity as a postwar European émigré deeply attached to his adopted Ontarian homeland and yet, as noted earlier, skeptical of Canadian nationalism. Vazan raised the question of

Canadian national identity by constructing a work on a site epitomizing the highpoint of centennial nationalism during Expo ’67. To this ostensible tribute to nationalist sentiment one could add a paean of civic pride: the inscriptions draw attention to a plot of internationally renowned, architecturally sophisticated, high-end real estate offering impressive riverside views of Old Montreal’s elegant skyline and the downtown core’s high-rises. The work’s catchy rhyming title evokes trendy social hotspots for urbanite hotshots. However, Vazan’s inscriptions also map a geological danger zone branded with targets and repeatedly “shot,” perhaps in retribution for nationalistic excess. This explosive cartography may further allude to volatile linguistic and cultural tensions in late 1970s Quebec amidst separatist politics and recent memories of the Québec Liberation Front.

Re-Writing, Re-Educating, Un-Inhabiting

Three additional strategies define the making and beholding of the sites of Canadian land art: writing, education, and inhabitation. Writing, broadly construed in the form of text, graphic inscriptions, and punctuation marks, as well as allusions to genres of writing, informs land art viewing devices. Vazan inscribed enigmatic pictograms seemingly derived from the dots and dashes of Morse code. These concentric rings also suggest the graphic conventions of a contour map of elevated landforms, perhaps ancient volcanos. The cord and stones in Mackenzie’s cartographic viewfinder inscribe patterns of movement and viewing through typographic and 303 punctuation marks evocative of Capability Brown’s grammatical conception of garden design.

Meanwhile, NETCo issued written instructions on signboards in an artwork contributing to an emerging genre of art criticism/travelogue known as the “field” or “site-report.” Ellis founded his exploration of shifting perceptions and weather on experiences recorded in his stream-of- consciousness ship’s log, whereas Reitzenstein’s apertures convey a symbolic autobiographical and genealogical narrative also incorporating themes from his poetry.

Through these textual viewing devices, land artists pursued a program of perceptual re- education about sites, a phenomenon recurring in writings by artists and critics of the era. The following anecdote encapsulates the visual education produced by Vazan’s archaeological and geological inquiries. The artist revealed that he was struck by his young children’s (and implicitly, much of the public’s) lack of direct, experiential familiarity with the movements of the planets and stars despite their learning of basic scientific theories at school.17 Vazan’s corrective visual pedagogy addresses this disparity between perceptual and abstract knowledge prevalent in Western society. Hot Spots Shot marks a return to a lived, observational experience of sites. Numerous authors, beginning with Heyer, have referred to this form of knowledge in

Vazan’s art as “cosmography,” defined as “a mixture of science, art [,] and philosophy” comprising a sensorial, observation-based understanding of the seasons, weather, and astronomical events.18 Perceptual pedagogy was also at the core of Iain Baxter’s program of visual education at Simon Fraser University and NETCo’s encouragement of the public’s cultivation of “visual sensitivity.” Ellis’s visual re-education consisted of dismantling learned spatial conventions and “perceptual attitudes” toward scenery. Mackenzie honed a visual and

17 Heyer, “Cosmography,” (includes a paraphrase of an interview with Vazan), 26.

18 Ibid. 304 kinesthetic sensitivity to alterations in sites while Reitzenstein maintained that the enhancement of sight through revelation was an essential prerequisite for the expansion of cognitive powers.

To pursue this sight pedagogy, artists devised sites precluding the viewer’s claim to complete visual and bodily mastery. More specifically, artists created sites not amenable to categories of real estate, personal property, functional home, or commodity. Vazan designed Hot

Spots Shot to be withdrawn from the public as the pigments faded. He highlighted the work’s ephemerality by juxtaposing the erodible, dissolvable traces with the stalwart concrete abodes of

Habitat ’67. Earlier, NETCo advertised rural unreal estate that could be neither possessed nor inhabited. Ellis invented a confusing view that could not be entered but rather lured the beholder into the artist’s critique of Eurocentric visuality and its complicity with colonialism.

Uncolonizable, non-surveyable sites appear in Mackenzie’s viewfinder prior to Reitzenstein’s descent into an uninhabitable anti-habitat.

Dark Spots, Hot Spots

To present the final feature defining the visually encountered sites of land art, I return to

Virilio. He identified land art as the last stronghold of a “localized” art embodying an aesthetics

“of appearance.” To the theorist, such art was under attack by a delocalization which produced a corresponding “aesthetics of disappearance.”19 In the wake of this “loss of place” in art during the age of virtual reality,20 “the presence of art” waned to a non-presence, a “dark spot.”21 In contrast to Virilio’s assertions, Canadian land artists deliberately produced views on the verge of disappearance. Viewing devices displayed new sites both present and partially lost from view, grounded on a particular physical setting and yet delocalized. Vazan intentionally used pigments

19 Virilio,“Dark Spot,” 130.

20 Ibid., 134.

21 Ibid., 142. 305 designed to fade quickly beneath visitors’ feet, rain, sun, and lawnmowers. Vazan’s white hot spots are destined to become “dark spots” of absence. The flow of NETCo’s cinematic quarter- mile odyssey ends abruptly with the command to “stop viewing.” Ellis’s subtle optical illusions either vanish upon the subject’s change of viewing position on the beach or evaporate in the fog and mists swathing his Pacific views that fade or overlap in his slide projections and photomontages. The site demarcated by Mackenzie with string and stones appears to dissolve amidst the many other stones and watery reflections in the loch during the final stage of his serial work. Later, Reitzenstein exposed a site obscured in shadow and menaced by possible collapse.

He implicated his own body in this withdrawal from view before definitively removing the site from direct viewing by refilling the burrow. These artworks do not consign sites to complete, irrevocable visual oblivion but instead suspend views on the cusp or in the process of disappearing.

Artists’ variations on the “loss of place” and disappearance from sight diverge from previous authors’ treatments of this subject. The lost sites of Canadian land artworks are not direct responses to new technologies as underscored by Virilio. Rather, these works embody artists’ investigations of sight in response to widely available, low-tech, or found materials and existing popular transportation technology. In consistently affirming the centrality of sight, land artists and their vanishing sites also did not conform to the anti-optical aesthetics of certain prominent examples of contemporaneous sculpture and earthworks emphasized by Boettger.

Canadian land artists’ exploration of disappearing views through undeniably material, often sculptural, viewing devices appealing to embodied experience further differs from the anti- optical, “dematerialized” conceptual art written about by Lippard. The aims and art historical context of Canadian land art must additionally be distinguished from De Duve’s argument 306

(presented in the Introduction) that American and European sculptors frequently took as their subject matter the loss of 20th-century art’s connection to sites. No evidence suggests that

Canadian artists began with the assumption that such a connection was already obviously lost in

Canadian art. The land artists examined in this study neither explicitly acknowledged nor reacted to a pervasive historical condition of lost sites as articulated by De Duve. Rather, these artists initiated the innovative loss of sites. The goals of these artists, as expressed in their interviews and notes as well as by the interpretive vocabulary of critics and curators of the era, distinguish the vanishing sites of Canadian land art. These writings, and above all, the artworks themselves, clarify that artists strove to expedite the revitalizing of sight and sites, which they considered essential to the sensorial, intellectual, and ethical growth of the perceptually deficient viewing subject of the late 1960s and 1970s. As viewing devices generate a crisis in sites, these newly destabilized and vanishing views challenge the sight of beholders. In the words of Vazan, “We as a species will exist as long as we observe.”22

22 Campbell, “Cosmic Dance,” (includes an interview with Vazan), 29. 307

CONCLUSION: FIGURE 69

Image was removed due to copyright restrictions.

Figure 69. Bill Vazan, Hot Spots Shot, 1977-1980. Chalk markings on grass, Cité du Havre, Montreal. 110 m x 615 m. Reproduced in Bill Vazan: Suites photographiques recentes et oeuvres sur le terrain (Montreal: Ministère des affaires culturelles, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 1981), 62-63. 308

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