Every stone or shady tree

In the British Museum's print room you can currently see Raphael to Cozens: Drawings from the Richard Payne Knight bequest. Here are three of the landscapes and a few notes on each one.

Guercino, Landscape with Angelica and Medoro, c. 1621

I have only mentioned Guercino (1591-1666) once before on this blog and never talked about one of his pictures. The exhibition caption notes that 'the figures of the two lovers and Cupid in the drawing, inspired by characters in Ludovico Ariosto's epic poem Orlando furioso (first published in 1516), are almost lost in Guercino's exuberant visual description of the landscape.' It was the names of these lovers carved in 'sundry places' that drove Orlando furioso - he was in love with Angelica. Here she is pointing at a tree, but the names also appear on a rock in front of them, because the lovers had been wandering around searching out 'every stone or shady tree,/ To grave their names with bodkin, knife or pin.' (This is from the first English translation by Sir John Harington, Queen Elizabeth's 'saucy Godson' and inventor of the flush toilet.)

Claude Lorrain, The River Tiber see from the Monte Mario, c. 1640

What's really striking about this one is Claude's use of brown ink wash - other Claude drawings in the exhibition are more precise descriptions of trees or buildings which he could use later in his paintings. However, the BM website explains that 'the development of this brush technique can be followed within the early sketchbook and in pen-and-wash studies of the 1640s.' They also note that 'brush drawings of this kind attracted the ire of John Ruskin (1819-1900), the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, who described them disparagingly in Modern Painters as "blottesque landscape"'.

 

John Robert Cozens, Mount Etna from the Grotta del Capro, c. 1777-78

Here, in the distance, is Mount Etna, which has recently been in the news, after erupting on June 2nd. Cozens accompanied Payne Knight on his second journey to Italy but didn't go as far as Sicily. This watercolour was therefore based on a study made by Charles Gore, transforming a topographical sketch into a study in the sublime. 'The figures are dwarfed by the trees and rocks and the bonfire, burning brilliantly against the moonlit sky. The hill and mountain brood menacingly in the background and the colours are subdued and subtly varied in tone. The poetic mood of the drawing is dark and sombre as a result.'

At the brink of dawn, the morne

 At the brink of dawn, the morne, forgotten, forgetful of blowing up.

- Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land 

Near the start of Césaire's long poem about Martinique there are five passages beginning 'at the brink of dawn, the morne.' To an English reader it sounds like a reference to morning, but he is actually talking about a West Indian landscape feature. The Bloodaxe translation by Mireille Rosello and Annie Pritchard includes a glossary and this is their explanation:

morne: In the West Indies, the word 'mornes' designates hills of volcanic origins. Metropolitan French people would not be familiar with the term. Symbolically, the 'morne' is linked with marooning because runaway slaves usually tried to hide there. Sometimes groups of maroons managed to establish more permanent settlements. In Caribbean literature, a paradigm exists opposing the plain, cane fields, submissiveness and the 'morne,' marooning, revolt and the woods.

I have never travelled in the West Indies but a quick google will show up 'mornes' in various islands aside from Martinique (where le Morne-Vert, le Morne-Rouge and Gros-Morne are the names of three Communes). There is Morne Fortune on Saint Lucia, Morne-à-l'Eau on Guadeloupe and various Dominican volcanoes with names like Morne aux Diables and Morne Plat Pays. Travellers to Martinique like Paul Gauguin and Lafcadio Hearn encountered mornes. A University of Plymouth blog post describes a visit to Morne d'Orange in pursuit of the vantage point from where Gauguin painted Martinique Landscape, now in the National Gallery of Scotland. A Telegraph article mentions Morne Lacroix in this context and quotes a curator who says it was painted from Habitation Beauregard - anyway, it's a bit confusing, but safe to say a morne is undoubtedly involved somewhere!

 

 

Paul Gauguin, Martinique Landscape, 1887

 

Lafcadio Hearn's Two Years in the French West Indies includes another definition of mornes: they 'usually have those beautiful and curious forms which bespeak volcanic origin even to the unscientific observer: they are most often pyramidal or conoid up to a certain height; but have summits either rounded or truncated;—their sides, green with the richest vegetation, rise from valley-levels and coast-lines with remarkable abruptness, and are apt to be curiously ribbed or wrinkled.' Search for 'mornes' in his text and you'll find numerous descriptions of landscape. I'll quote just one here, on the mornes of Martinique (ths could literally be described as purple prose):

Day wanes. The further western altitudes shift their pearline gray to deep blue where the sky is yellowing up behind them; and in the darkening hollows of nearer mornes strange shadows gather with the changing of the light—dead indigoes, fuliginous purples, rubifications as of scoriae,—ancient volcanic colors momentarily resurrected by the illusive haze of evening. And the fallow of the canes takes a faint warm ruddy tinge. On certain far high slopes, as the sun lowers, they look like thin golden hairs against the glow,—blond down upon the skin of the living hills. 

This is not how mornes appear in Notebook of a Return to My Native Land. Césaire's island is a 'sick paradise' (Mireille Rosello), with colonial diseases, rural poverty and a long history of slavery. Hearn describes a beautiful sunset view; here is Césaire's morne at the brink of dawn...

At the brink of dawn, the morne squatting in front of a boulimia a craving for thunderstorms and mills, slowly vomiting its human exhaustion, the morne alone and its spilt blood, the morne with its bandages of shade, the morne with its rivulets of fear, the morne with its great hands of wind.

Conway Castle - Panoramic View

Conway Castle - Panoramic View of Conway on the L.& N.W. Railway

I've been reading Bryony Dixon's book The Story of Victorian Film which can be seen as an extension of the brilliant free-to-access BFI Victorian Film archive. For example, she discusses Conway Castle - Panoramic View of Conway on the L.& N.W. Railway, a 'sedately paced' landscape film which the BFI website describes thus:

This beautiful film, shot in February 1898, has a dream-like quality and is hand tinted (possibly stencilled). It is believed to have been coloured some time after it was first shown as no contemporary reviews or advertisements refer to what would surely have been a major selling/talking point, 1898 being very early for coloured films.

This film was made in response to the first American phantom train ride film (by the British Mutoscope and Biograph's parent company, the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company), 'The Haverstraw Tunnel', which showed the scenery around the Hudson river and a tunnel and so delighted the audience that the British operation decided to make their own version, which also proved very popular - it showed not only in London but also in Rochester, New York, and then travelled all over Europe, still being shown in cinemas as late as 1910. This film is preserved by the EYE Filmmuseum, Netherlands.

Dixon's chapter 'Moving Images: Panoramas, Phantom Rides and Travel' explains that the first travel film made from a moving vehicle was Alexander Promio's Panorama du Grand Canal pris d'un bateaux, shot from a gondola on 25 October 1896. There are several versions of this uploaded on YouTube and I've embedded one of them below. Two years later Biograph produced Panoramic View of the Vegetable Market at Venice with a large format camera that gives a remarkably clear, almost 3D stereoscopic effect. Such films can be related in their subjects and composition to earlier picturesque views in art, as well as the more recent phenomenon of moving panoramas (views unfurled on rolled-up cotton with a lecturer explaining each scene). A little later we get more Italian travelogues with more than one shot - Visit to Pompeii (1901) is 8 minutes long and features a 360-degree pan of the ruins, a lovely misty view of Vesuvius with sheep providing motion in the foreground and then a ride up the volcano's funicular railway (another version of the 'phantom train ride'). One more to recommend you look at is Ride on the Peak Tramway (1900), filmed in Hong Kong, which has a grainy, mesmerising quality. 'As the tram crests the peak it's just possible to see the huge vista of Victoria Harbour and Kowloon laid out before us, as if viewed from the world's greatest natural rollercoaster.' 

 

 

Another interesting genre discussed in Bryony Dixon's book is the sea wave film. 'Nearly every report of early film screening mentions audience reaction to films of sea waves. Films showing the movement of water were very popular for their mesmeric effect as well as for the initial shock they gave audiences at their feeling of 'absolute realness''. She quotes a reaction to Birt Acres' early Rough Sea at Dover (1895) - "It is not too much to say that persons seated near the screen must have shrunk from the approaching billows which gathered, lifted their foam-tossed crests, curled and crashed down with an absolute realism from which nothing was wanted but the roar." Again there are obvious precedents in art and recent photography (Acres was himself a photographer). Cecil Hepworth's film Rough Seas Breaking on Rocks (1899) reminds me of the 'rough seas' genre of postcards I wrote about here in 2011.  Dixon lists other examples but notes in particular 'the beautiful Sea Cave Near Lisbon, filmed by Henry Short for Robert Paul in 1896, in which Portugal's famous Boca di Inferno (Mouth of Hell) frames the waves swirling and smashing against the rocks.'

 

Sea Cave Near Lisbon

Roden Crater

I thought I would follow up my last post on Katie Paterson with something about James Turrell, whose light works I was reminded of when looking at her Light Bulb to Simulate Moonlight (2008).  I have been reading James Turrell: A Retrospective, a sumptuously produced book which I should think gets as close as possible to giving a sense of what his artworks look like, even though they are nearly impossible to describe in two dimensional photography and words on a page. It is interesting how often the word 'landscape' is used in the book, even though what is usually being described is a perceptual environment or spaces from which to observe the sky.  Of course Turrell is a contemporary of the American land artists and it is easy to relate his magnum opus, Roden Crater, to their more monumental earthworks.  Turrell himself has said, 'I am not an Earth artist, I'm totally involved in the sky.'  But works like Observatory by Robert Morris (1971) and Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels (1973-6), which are aligned with the solstice, can be seen as precursors to Roden Crater.

Roden Crater

Source: Wikimedia Commons

It was clear from the book that Turrell's career hinges on that famous flight in 1974 when he located the setting for what has become his life's work. An experienced pilot, Turrell used a Guggenheim Foundation to fuel his plane and scoured the western states to find 'a solitary cinder cone or a butte' that would allow him to create the perfect space from which to experience the phenomenon of 'celestial vaulting'.  Work continues at Roden Crater - there are plans for a Fumarole, for example, which will look like a giant eye.  A pool will act as a lens and light from the sky will pass over it through an aperture.  'At night, the still water will focus images of the stars onto a floor of black volcanic cinder underneath such that a visitor might have the experience of walking on light from the stars.  The bowl shape of the bath's bronze-and-glass bottom is complemented by a small invisible antenna on the aperture's edge that effectively turns it into a simple radio telescope.  Bathers will be able to submerge their ears under the water to hear the ancient static radio noise emitted from the portion of the sky visible through the aperture.'

Some of the inspirations for Turrell's work, and some of the phenomena he has explored in his art:

Skyspaces - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - blackout curtains - the desert landscapes drawn by George Herriman in his 1940s Krazy Kat cartoons - the view from the Apollo spacecraft - Plato's Cave - Ganzfelds - Minimalism - Perceptual Cells - Blake's 'doors of perception' - Quakerism - the temple at Borobudur - Mesoamerican pyramids - emblemata depicting effects of light in a 1636 book by Guilielmus Hesius - Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows - Buddhism's 'embrace of the void'...

Of course Turrell is familiar with the ways light has been used in the history of art, but his whole practice has been to work with light, rather than merely representing it.

According to the Christine Y. Kim in James Turrell: A Retrospective, there are now more than seventy-five Skyspaces around the world, enclosed chambers with an opening that lets visitors contemplate the sky.  You can find photographs of these online - the one I have included below is in Switzerland and actually shows the view out through its door (I guess if the spectacle of the sky starts to pall, you can still contemplate the Alps).  There are some spectacular looking Skyspaces in sunny places like Napa Valley, California.  Photographs of the Skyspace in Yorkshire Sculpture Park (which I mentioned here once before) show a damp patch of floor where the rain has entered.  Another British example is Cat Cairn (2000), in Northumberland, built with natural stone to blend into the landscape (the Kielder website explains that Turrell has recently upgraded the lighting system for this work).  Back in 2000 Monty Don wrote in The Observer about his experience of Cat Cairn.  'The experience of sitting quietly (albeit freezing) is enormously satisfying and enriching, even though sensation is stripped down and pared back as far as it will go without being diminished. All superfluities are abandoned. I would love this in my garden.'

James Turrell, Skyspace, Piz Uter, (inside) - 2005

Source: Wikimedia Commons: Kamahele

Mundus Subterraneus

I have been immersed in Athanasius Kircher's Theatre of the World, a (literally) wonderful and wittily-written book about the great seventeenth century polymath.  Its author Joscelyn Godwin is something of a polymath himself but has written mainly about music and the occult (he has featured on this blog before as translator of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili).  The book discusses Kircher's inventions, some of which were housed in his museum at the Jesuit Roman College, and covers his extensive writings in Latin on language, religion, geography, science, music and many other topics.  There have been numerous books on Kircher in recent years and Godwin was the author of one of the first of these (in 1979); his aim in this subsequent volume was to focus attention on Kircher's illustrations. These, in contrast to the some of the original texts, 'have a quality of ingenuity and strangeness that are particular to his century, and of singular appeal to ours.'

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, c. 1563

The engravers worked from Kircher's designs which were either his own inventions or adaptations from other sources, sometimes mere sketches sent by travellers and correspondents.  The Tower of Babel reproduced on the cover of this book comes from Turris Babel (1679) and was obviously inspired by the famous Breugel painting.  It was actually drawn by Coenraet Decker and engraved by Lievin Cruyle.  The tower differs from Bruegel's in having 'a system of crossing ramps from one of Kircher's favourite ancient buildings, the Temple of Fortune in Praeneste'.  Bruegel's tower looks like it is being built in the Flemish countryside, but Kircher's is surrounded by ancient monuments, including numerous pyramids and obelisks, subjects he treated extensively in Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652-4) and Obeliscus Aegyptiacus (1666).  His fascination with the obelisks of Rome made me want to revisit the city and spend a day tracking them all down, from the Flaminian obelisk now in the Piazza del Popolo to the Sallustian obelisk at the top of the Spanish Steps.

 Athanasius Kircher, The Earthly Paradise, from Arca Noë (1675)

Kircher's depictions of ancient sites as they might once have appeared range from the Roman villas that he could visit around Tivoli to places for which he had to rely on ancient texts: the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the citadel of Atlantis and the Garden of Eden (above).  For China Illustrata (1667) he made use of the Travels of Marco Polo and more recent information sent back by his fellow Jesuits.  It includes depictions of the Mountain of Fe, shaped either naturally or artificially (Kircher puts arguments for both possibilities) into the resemblance of a Chinese god; the Seven Peaks, which seem to correspond to the configuration of the Great Bear; and Lake Chin, on the surface of which float waterlilies and, more strangely, a child on a piece of wood, the sole survivor of a city destroyed by an earthquake.  In this volume Kircher also illustrates Dragon and Tiger Mountain with the creatures themselves about to fight each other.  Although sceptical of some mythical creatures, Kircher believed in the existence of dragons, even in Europe.  'It may surprise the reader', Joscelyn Edwards observes, 'to learn that dragons were nowhere more prevalent than in Switzerland.'  The idea of a dragon on Mt Pilatus terrorising Lucerne inevitably recalled for me Smaug's destruction of Lake-town in The Hobbit.

Athanasius Kircher, Dragons of Lake Lucerne, from Mundus Subterraneous (1664-78)

Some of Kircher's most famous 'landscape' drawings are in Mundus Subterraneus where they illustrate his theories of geography, geology and the movement and actions of fire and water.  His notion of the hydrological cycle required underground mountain reservoirs and subterranean channels connecting the seas.  At the North and South Poles, as yet unknown, he imagined the global flow of water governed by a vast whirlpool and spring.  I have included here before his image of Mt Vesuvius, a volcano Kircher explored himself.  Inside the crater he 'perceived the groaning and shaking of the dreadful mountain, the inexplicable stench, the dark smoke mixed with globes of fire which the bottom and sides of the mountain continuously vomited forth from eleven different places, forcing me at times to vomit it out myself...'

 Athanasius Kircher, The Loudspeaker System at Mentorella, from Phonurgia Nova (1673)

Kircher wrote a topographical study, Latium (1671) about the region around Rome.  He was particularly drawn to the sanctuary of Mentorella, which he helped preserve, and it was here that he performed some of his acoustic experiments, with loudspeakers directed at the surrounding hills (see above).  This sacred place had witnessed the conversion of St Eustace, when the figure of Christ appeared between the antlers of a stag (see illustration below).  Kircher's book Historia Eustachio-Mariana (1665) contains a memorable description of his discovery of the sanctuary and I will end this post with it.  As Joscelyn Godwin remarks, 'the eighteenth century did not invent the Sublime, nor the Romantic era the melancholy attraction of ruined choirs.'

 'In 1661, while I was exploring the mountains of Polano and Praeneste, I started in Tivoli and passed through wild mountains and rocks.  Around noon I came to a horrid, solitary place, hemmed round with rocks like a crown.  It really was a place filled with horror, where the stony pyramids seemed to scrape the heavens, and, falling from hanging rocks in formidable vortices, seemed to express infernal motion.  In the midst of all this, among dark trees and rocks, I came across the remnants of a roof: it was a church, all but collapsed.  But how could there be a church in this place of terror and solitude?  I asked the guide.  Going in I saw the pictures and sculptures of the saints.  Everything breathed the devotion of ancient piety.'

 Athanasius Kircher, The Conversion of St. Eustace, from Latium (1671)

The Pink and White Terraces

Charles Blomfield, Pink Terraces, 1886

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Earlier this month news came in that the lost terraces of Lake Rotomahana had been discovered.  The Pink Terrace (Te Otukapuarangi - 'the fountain of the clouded sky') and the White Terrace (Te Tarata - 'the tattooed rock') were three quarters of a mile apart, each a descending sequence of pools formed by silica in the water that welled up from geothermal springs.  Having first been described by a European traveller in the early 1840s, they become a major tourist attraction for visitors to New Zealand; but in 1886, following an eruption of Mount Tarawera, they disappeared.  Two researchers now think the terraces may lie preserved under mud and ash and are assembling a “team of the willing” to explore the site.  However, in its report The Guardian cautions that another team thought they had found the terraces in 2011, and only last year GNS Science New Zealand concluded that most of them had been destroyed.

 Charles Blomfield, White Terraces, Rotomahana, 1903

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Some photographs were taken of the terraces (see below), but our main idea of what they looked like comes from the paintings of Charles Blomfield (1848-1926).  He began making landscape views in the North Island in the 1870s and the sketches he made of the Pink and White Terraces were source material for paintings long after the landscape had been buried.  Contemporary travel writers felt the inadequacy of words to convey the form and colours of what was before them.  In The Australian Abroad (1879) James Hingston was unequal to the task of describing Te Tarata: 'we had better stop until we get the shade of J. M. W. Turner, that great painter of the mystic, to assist us.'  However, as Lydia Wevers says in Country of Writing: Travel Writing and New Zealand, 'like many travel writers who apostrophise the indescribability of the terraces, Hingston proceeds to describe them for several paragraphs.'

Charles Spencer, Hot Water Cups, White Terrace, 1880

Source: Wikimedia Commons

In 1877 the prolific travel writer and painter Constance Gordon-Cumming visited Lake Rotomahana (her account can be read in Chapter XXV of At Home in Fiji).  The White Terraces were 'in nature what the Taj Mahal at Agra is in architecture, — a thing indescribable — a fairy city of lace carved in pure marble, — a thousand waterfalls suddenly frozen and fringed with icicles.'  The next day she took in Te Otukapuarangi and 'got a large very careful drawing from the ridge overlooking these terraces, with our tent and the white terraces on the other side of the lake.'  Lydia Wevers criticises the proprietorial birds-eye view Gordon-Cumming adopted in her sketches and the very Victorian attitude of colonial entitlement evident in her writing.  After painting the landscape she got into a dispute over whether a payment should be made to the local Maori (they had been asking £5 for a photograph and thought paintings would warrant a higher fee).

The Pink Terrace, New Zealand 

from Oceana, or England and her Colonies by James Anthony Froude (1886)

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Before this unpleasantness over money occurred, Constance Gordon-Cumming had been relaxing in the waters of the Pink Terraces.  You can see from a description like this why people would be motivated to try to find them again, though surely their original magic would be unrecoverable:

'Rock and water are alike smooth and warm and pleasant, and you can prolong the delight of the bath to any extent, passing from one pool to another, sometimes receiving a gentle shower as the sparkling drops trickle from the overhanging rim of a pool, perhaps eight or ten feet above you, or else lying still in passive enjoyment, and watching the changing lights that flit across lake and hill, and all the time the kindly water is coating you with a thin film of that silica which makes the bath so smooth and the bather so silky'

I will conclude here with another description of this experience from perhaps the most famous visitor to the terraces, Anthony Trollope.  He was there in 1873 and remarked on the shell-like appearance of these natural pools, in which 'four or five may sport ... each without feeling the presence of the other.'

'In the bath, when you strike your chest against it, it is soft to the touch. You press yourself against it, and it is smooth. You lie upon it, and though it is firm, it gives to you. You plunge against the sides, driving the water over your body, but you do not bruise yourself. ... I have never heard of other bathing like this in the world.'

Charles Blomfield, White Terraces, Rotomahana, 1897

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Naturgemälde

Friedrich Georg Weitsch, Alexander von Humboldt, 1806

Images: Wikimedia Commons

Andrea Wulf has just won another prize for The Invention of Nature and I am not surprised as it is a really good read.  In addition to telling the life of Alexander von Humboldt, she has chapters on other great men who he influenced: Goethe, Jefferson, Bolívar, Darwin, Thoreau, Haeckel, Muir and America's first environmentalist, George Perkins Marsh.  Of course Humboldt was so protean and long-lived that she could have included far more people, at the risk of turning her own book into something the size of Humboldt's thirty-four volume Voyage to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent.  The one time I have referred to Humboldt's influence on this blog was in connection with Carl Gustav Carus and his notion of Earth-life painting - Carus doesn't make it into the book at all.  Here though are some of the artists, writers and composers she does mention, in connection with three of Humboldt's most widely read publications.

In 1808 Humboldt published Views of Nature in Germany and France, combining scientific facts with poetic landscape description.  Reading it, Goethe told him 'that I plunged with you into the wildest regions' and Chateaubriand said that 'you believe you are surfing the waves with him, losing yourself with him in the depths of the woods.'  Later it inspired Darwin, Thoreau and Emerson.  Jules Verne used passages verbatim in his Voyages Extraordinaires, particularly The Mighty Orinoco.  Captain Nemo owned the complete works of Alexander von Humboldt.

In 1814 Humboldt's account of his travels in South America, the Personal Narrative, appeared in England and started to influence writers like Wordsworth, who adapted a passage for his sonnet sequence on the River Duddon. Coleridge may already have read him in the original German; he had spent some time with Wilhelm, the 'brother of the great traveller', in Rome in 1805.  Byron had fun with the idea of Humboldt's cyanometer, a device for measuring the blueness of the sky which he had taken on his travels.  Here are the lines from Don Juan:

Humboldt, 'the first of travellers,' but not
The last, if late accounts be accurate,
 Invented, by some name I have forgot,
As well as the sublime discovery's date,
An airy instrument, with which he sought
To ascertain the atmospheric state,
 By measuring 'the intensity of blue:'
O, Lady Daphne! let me measure you!

Horace Bénédicte de Saussure, cyanometer, 1760

 Saussure (like Humboldt a scientist and mountaineer) originally devised the cyanometer

In 1845, after eleven years' work, Humboldt published Cosmos, a huge success with students, scientists, politicians and even royalty (Prince Albert ordered a copy).  Hector Berlioz declared him 'a 'dazzling writer; the book was so popular among musicians, Berlioz said, that he knew one who had 'read, re-read, pondered and understood' Cosmos during his breaks at opera performances when his colleagues played on.'  In America, Emerson got hold of one of the first copies, Poe was inspired by it to write his visionary last work Eureka, and Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass with a copy of Cosmos on his desk.

 

Frederic Edwin Church, The Heart of the Andes, 1859

On the day Humboldt died in May 1859, New Yorkers were queuing to see a painting he had inspired: The Heart of the Andes by Frederic Edwin Church.  Church had gone to South America and retraced Humboldt's route, returning to paint landscapes that united poetic feeling with scientific accuracy.  The New York Times described him as 'the artistic Humboldt of the new world.'  Church wanted his painting to travel to Berlin so that the old man could see again 'the scenery which delighted his eyes sixty years ago.'  When he heard the news of Humboldt's passing, Church said that it felt as if he had 'lost a friend.'

Alexander von Humboldt, Naturgemälde, 1807

The Invention of Nature begins on a high ridge of Chimborazo, the great extinct volcano that Humboldt climbed in 1802.  Nobody had ever been this high before, not even the early balloonists.  After descending to the Andean foothills, Humboldt began to sketch the first version of his famous Naturgemälde - an image of Chimborazo familiar to those of us professionally interested in infographics but more importantly, as Andrea Wulf emphasises, an encapsulation in one two-by three foot page of Humboldt's new vision of nature as a living whole.  She ends her book with a beautiful quote from his friend Goethe, who compared Humboldt to a 'fountain with many spouts from which streams flow refreshingly and infinitely, so that we only have to place vessels under them.'

A landscape built of pure life

Among the Convolutes of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project (translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin MacLoughlin), one section is devoted to 'Ancient Paris, Catacombs, Demolitions, Decline of Paris.'  There, Benjamin observes that 'few things in the history of humanity are as well known to us as the history of Paris':

'Many of the main thoroughfares have their own special literature, and we possess written accounts of thousands of the most inconspicuous houses.  In a beautiful turn of phrase, Hugo von Hofmannsthal called [this city] 'a landscape built of pure life:' And at work in the attraction it exercises on people is the kind of beauty that is proper to great landscapes - more precisely, to volcanic landscapes.  Paris is a counterpart in the social order to what Vesuvius is in the geographic order: a menacing, hazardous massif, an ever-active hotbed of revolution.  But just as the slopes of Vesuvius, thanks to the layers of lava that cover them, have been transformed into paradisal orchards, so the lava of revolutions provides uniquely fertile ground for the blossoming of art, festivity, fashion.'

Vesuvius, from Mundus Subterraneus by Athanasius Kircher, 1664

Field of Reeds

This is my annual post on landscape music - the earlier ones (with apologies for a few dead links now) are here: 2010, 2011, 2012.  I discussed a couple of excellent records earlier in the year so won't linger over these here: My Garden State by Glenn Jones and In St Cuthbert's Time by Chris Watson (I also wrote about Hiroki Sasajima's work but neglected to mention Circle Wind, sounds recorded at night around Tokyo and other urban locations).  Many of the themes I observed in 2012 were present this year too: encounters with mountains, rivers and islands; the search for politically charged sites and landscapes haunted by history; continuing attempts to expand field recording beyond simple notions of soundscape; music composed in studios or outdoors as an offshoot of wider artistic endeavours and then sold in a range of collectible formats.  Particularly noticeable this year, I think, has been the way some musicians and sound artists have engaged in different forms of field work, walking the landscape and documenting their findings in film and text as well as recorded sound.  The finished compositions are therefore the product of a period of research: digging in archives and libraries, investigations of particular sites or topographical features, close observation of natural phenomena and acoustic experimentation.      

Typical of this trend is an album by The Memory Band, on whose website you can read a series of Stephen Cracknell's Field Reports.  They were made whilst exploring the South Country and composing On the Chalk (Our Navigation of the Line of the Downs).  Cracknell explains that his steps were guided by old topographical writings - Belloc, Massingham, R. Hippisley Cox’s Green Roads Of England, Ancient Trackways Of Wessex by H.W. Timperley & Edith Brill.  On the day the record was complete he set off again on The Harrow Way, a semi-legendary ancient path: 'I walked the best part of sixty miles in those three days ending at Stonehenge, blistered and hobbled but elated.'  There is a Caught by the River review of the album by Rob St. John in which he describes On the Chalk as a place 'where the pastoral meets the produced, where machines (whether cars, planes or drum machines) plough patterned furrows through rich and partially-obscured landscapes. As Cracknell puts it in the sleeve notes: ‘It is an album about change, the power of human will and our relationship with the landscape as we pass through it’.'

Place and its relationship to history have been the subject of another ongoing investigation by lo-fi duo Way Through.  Last year I mentioned here seeing them play at Cafe Oto, supporting James Brooks / Land Observations, whose own landscape project was dedicated to Roman Roads (and who contributed this year to Simon Fisher Turner's new soundtrack for The Epic of Everest).  Way Through's latest album, Clapper is Still, includes ‘Dedham Vale’ and 'Eyam', songs about two very different villages preserved as heritage sites, 'Sipson', on a site that is, in contrast, under threat from the expansion of Heathrow Airport, and ‘Imber and Tyneham’, referring to places that were cleared of their inhabitents during World War Two (the latter is Patrick Wright's 'Village that Died for England').  Rob St. John has reviewed this one as well for Caught by the River: 'lyrics cribbed from local history leaflets, information boards and bus stop graffiti become spoken and sung invocations of the sublime, the suburban and the specific. Chiming, often-dissonant guitar gusts off into post-punk angles: plotting new cartographical soundings over old ground.'

Rob St. John himself has been exploring Edinburgh's waterways, documenting his researches as a 7" single with accompanying essays and prints. This was part of the Year of Natural Scotland, for which numerous artists seem to have been making work in 2013, navigating a system of funding streams as complex as the lochs, drains, springs and sewers of the city.  Chris Dooks was another sound artist involved in this, with a film, Tiny Geographies and accompanying soundtrack; he has also recently completed Ciga{r}les, a set of treated field recordings made partly for therapeutic reasons (I think the looped voices on the former and combination of bagpipes and cicadas on the latter may not appeal to everyone).  Although the Natural Scotland projects sound interesting, they make you wonder how far records themselves can be appreciated out of context.  To stand on its own, a set of sound recordings need to be reorientated: Geoff Mullen's Filtered Water for example, is two long pieces derived from a 'multi-channel sound installation in the backwoods of Hudson Valley', converted into a mono recording.  Similarly, Jem Finer and Andrew Kötting's Visionary Seascapes is more than simply the soundtrack to the film they made last year with Iain Sinclair, Swandown.  



Pilgrim Chants & Pastoral Trails by Sharron Kraus is another album dedicated to a specific landscape.  One sunny day, she writes, whilst driving through the Welsh countryside, "I had the overwhelming sense that there was music contained in the landscape, waiting to be discovered. I decided to move to Mid-Wales, to a quiet place just north of that valley and try to tap into that music and draw it out."  The resulting compositions couldn't be less like Way Through; Joseph Stannard in The Wire praised their 'wild magic and windswept beauty.'  Kraus cites Richard Skelton as an influence, and this year he has been re-visiting music inspired by the landscape of Ulpha, in south-west Cumbria.  These kind of recordings, like field notes or diaries, can be returned to and developed in new ways.  He and Autumn Richardson describe the composition of Succession in almost scientific terms: 'the process of recovering these fragments and threading them into song is analogous to the work of palynologists, reconstructing images of past landscape ecologies from the layers of sediment. It is a kind of archaeology, a work of archivism.' 

Swiss sound artist Marcus Maeder has been leading 'trees', a research project conducted by the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology (ICST) in collaboration with the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL).  Their aim is to 'combine field recordings of meteorological phenomena, recordings of acoustic emissions in trees and acoustic representations (sonifications) of ecophysiological data in one single auditory experience and make their correlation acoustically and aesthetically experienceable and explorable.'  Some of this sounds like the old dream of listening to the landscape directly, an idea I have often referred to here (see for example my post from earlier this year, Shoreless River).  Maeder's own CD, topographie sinusoïdale, constructs music as if it were a landscape: 'arranged in space, defining upper and lower boundaries of spatial objects, cliffs, edges, slow passages from one scene to another, at times focusing on details of a larger group of objects.'  Reviewing it recently in The Wire, Richard Pennell found it 'a very pretty, gently fluid piece of music, but a little too anodyne, an overlong watercolour wash.'  

The same could not be said for Emptyset - Paul Purgas and James Ginzburg - who specialise in subjecting resonant sites to noise at high volumes and frequencies and recording the results.  At the start of the year they had an installation at Tate Britain as part of the Performing Architecture series.  Here's what Boomkat had to say about their latest release, Material: 'In what has become the dominant theme of Emptyset's work, the cavernous architecture of the different settings - Trawsfynydd Nuclear Power Station in Snowdonia, Ambika P3 in London, and Chislehurst Mine in Kent - becomes a component of the music itself, the duo's bowel-shaking low frequencies responding to every nook, curve and surface texture of these man-made caves. When you think of the uses these spaces have historically been put to (chalk and flint mining, Magnox nuclear reaction, concrete testing), it's hard to think of Material as anything but industrial music in its purest, or at least most literal, form.'

Touch always feature in my annual surveys, and a new BJ Nilson album coming out shortly sounds interesting - 'a somewhat surreal audio rendition of the sounds of The City of London.'  Earlier in the year they released Diluvial, a collaboration between Wire's Bruce Gilbert and Beaconsfield ArtWorks on the theme of rising sea levels. Another album of note was Burkhard Stangl's Unfinished. For William Turner, painter, inspired by the artist's extraordinary late work (Tate Britain has an exhibition planned for next year, Late Turner: Painting Set Free, so I expect to see this CD on sale in their shop).  Then there was Stromboli, a collection of field recordings by Geir Jenssen, better known as Biosphere for his 'arctic techno' - most recently N-Plants (2011), an album inspired by the Japanese nuclear industry and recorded a month before the Fukashima disaster.  Jenssen has also been active in mountaineering and in 2001 climbed the Himalayan peak Cho Oyu.  The sounds he assembled on that expedition were released a few years later as Cho Oyu 8201m – Field Recordings from Tibet.  The new album for Touch consists of a Stromboli soundscape on the first side and a 'dub version' (subtly different) on the other.



Another volcanic area, Lyttelton, on the South Island of New Zealand, has been explored by Jo Burzynska, who records as Stanier Black-Five.  For her album Avast! 'sounds were captured at sites around the natural amphitheatre of this extinct caldera: from abandoned wartime bunkers on the top of the crater rim to the port and its cacophony of cargo ships, tugs and workshops.'  This area was also the epicentre of the earthquake that hit Christchurch in 2011.  Burzynska 'grabbed a recording device as she ran from her home, leaving it running on her doorstep capturing the aftershocks that ricocheted though her house and the disaster unfolding on the street outside.'  These sounds were then used in the album Body Waves, a collaboration with Malcolm Riddoch (whose exotic pseudonym is Zeug Gezeugt).  Reading about some of these sound artists, I sometimes end up thinking I'm in the wrong line of work... Jo Burzynska manages to combine field recording with being a wine writer and this summer created a 'multi-sensory sound and wine installation' for an event called Oenosthesia in Auckland.



It is impossible here to cover all the significant field recordings released in 2013 - hopefully The Field Reporter will put together a survey like they did last year.  However, I'd like to mention two of the organisers of In the Field, the symposium I attended in February, who have releases out this year: Cathy Lane, who has brought together interviews, archive recordings and natural sounds in The Hebrides Suite (see 'On the Machair', above) and Ian Rawes, who has put together together a record of some highlights from his London Sound Survey.  Last year Ian's British Library colleague Cheryl Tipp gave me some suggestions for notable releases to mention here.  This year she has drawn my attention to Luis Antero's project O Rio / the River.  The first part is a confluence of water sounds recorded along the Alvoco river in Portugal.  The newly issued second instalment documents the memories of  an old river-keeper and three villagers who talk about the disused watermills.  The Impulsive Habitat label that put out Antero's recordings (run by David Velez, who set up The Field Reporter) has dealt in a diverse range of soundscapes this year: the Madagascan rainforest, the Parque Nacional Natural Los Nevados in Columbia, the Crack of Humahuaca in Argentina, the road between Takasaki and Tokyo, the platforms of Union Station in Kansas City, and the 'grimy laneways' of inner Sydney Camperdown. 

Back in 2010 I devoted a post here to the music of John Luther Adams, including Inuksuit, a composition designed to be played and heard out in the landscape.  Cantaloupe, the label run by Bang on a Can, have now put this out on CD for the first time: a recording made in the forest surrounding Guilford Sound in Guilford, Vermont.  Back in July, Ivan Hewitt interviewed Adams and it is worth reading his account of experiencing Inuksuit among the beech trees at the University of Richmond.  Having reached a crescendo the music subsided, the musicians went their separate ways and the audience 'ambled out into the trees and along the lake, pausing to listen to a vibraphone player here, a flautist there. Waves of sound rose, changed colour very slowly, and passed through the trees. Eventually they dispersed, but one couldn’t be sure for some time that the music was finally over.'

There are still composers writing more traditional programmatic music inspired by nature: Jennifer Higdon for example, whose An Exaltation of Larks and Sky Quartet appeared this year (she can be heard on the Q2 music Soundcloud site introducing her music, including other landscape related compositions like 'City Scape', 'Summer Shimmers', 'Autumn Reflexions' and 'Dooryard Bloom', a setting of Walt Whitman). There is landscape too in the poetry of Ted Kooser, whose words were put to music this year by Dawn Upshaw and Maria Schneider for their song cycle Winter Morning Walks.  Personally I would rather listen to Hirta Songs, a collaboration between Alasdair Roberts and Robin Robertson (whose poetry and compelling voice I have referred to here before).  Robertson has written self-deprecatingly in The Guardian that the poem he wrote after visiting the island of St Kilda was 'really just a list of place names' - 'although it gave some sense of the scale of the place, and allowed for the sea-rhythms, the poem had lots of topography, but no real narrative.'  So he got together with Roberts to work up a set of folk songs and tell the island's stories, but that original poem, 'Leaving St Kilda', remains in the middle of the album, read to the accompaniment of Corrina Hewat's gentle harp.



Musical collaboration increasingly occurs remotely over the internet: one example from 2013 was Temperament as Waveform by field recordists Lee Patterson and Vanessa Rossetto.  It was interesting therefore to read that Taylor Deupree and Australian Cameron Webb (Seaworthy) deliberately went to great lengths to meet and walk together  the snow before composing Wood, Winter, Hollow.  Deupree prefers 'the human interaction and local landscapes over the soulless exchange of sound files.'  So 'the pair struck out in a New York February to a 4,000 acre nature preserve near Deupree’s studio called Ward Pound Ridge, a park rich in history that supports a diverse range of plant and animal life. While the cold of winter kept most of the animals quiet the landscape nonetheless teemed with sounds.'  They recorded raindrops on stone, wind in the beech trees and a creak slowly flowing through ice.  Later, in the warmth of the studio, these were combined with bells, sticks, melodica, analog synthesiser and the gentle sound of Seaworthy's guitar.  The result (see below) is quite different from 'Rusted Oak', Deupree's ambient soundscape that I featured in my 2010 Landscape Music round-up.
   


Field of Reeds, These New Puritans' follow-up to Hidden (NME's album of the year for 2010) has been a difficult one for reviewers to get their heads round.  It has been interesting to see it described by some critics as if it were another exploration of Essex (the 'new English landscape', according to Ken Worpole's recent book).  Here is Luke Turner, writing for The Quietus... 'The estuarine landscape of Field Of Reeds is best seen in two ways: in grand panorama from an aircraft banking over London, when sun glints off the water of the Thames widening toward the North Sea. Or, on the other hand, oozy intimacy along the rough shoreline, traditionally a site for dumping the waste of London. Here, alongside creeks where air bubbles rattle from the mud with the ebbing tide, a rutted horizon offers up gifts of ancient marmalade pots, broken clay pipes, fused and rusted metal. It's a landscape that refuses, like memory or dreams, to be defined or contained, that forever shifts and opens itself up to new narratives and fresh explorations.'

With both musicians and reviewers taking inspiration from the new nature writers and psychogeographers, it was no real surprise earlier this year to come across a project directly influenced by W. G. Sebald.  I can't now recall the exact circumstances in which I initially read The Rings of Saturn back in 1995, but it would have been in my first flat, at the top of a house in Tufnell Park.  I imagine my concentration was occasionally broken by the sound of baselines throbbing from the flat below, owned by record producer Dilip Harris.  Now, all these years later, I see that he and Rob Gallagher of Galliano have assumed the joint identity William Adamson and recorded Under An East Coast Moon, an album that draws 'inspiration from the Suffolk landscape – ancient burial grounds, fortifications against Nazi invaders, sea defences now inadequate against global warming and forests felled by the great storm of 1987.' Its 'cautionary tales of fallen women, folk songs and gothic legends fuse with reflections and refractions from W. G. Sebald’s book The Rings of Saturn.'

Well that'll probably do for now, but feel free to comment below on the interesting landscape related music I have neglected to mentioned. I'll end this post with the trailer for The Epic of Everest, scored by Simon Fisher Turner. 

The Bay of Naples from Palazzo Sessa

Expanding Horizons: Giovanni Battista Lusieri and the Panoramic Landscape, the most exciting art exhibition this year, will shortly be coming to the end of its run at the Scottish National Gallery.  You can be forgiven for not knowing much about Lusieri: scholarly interest in him has been growing but as recently as 1996 he was not deemed important enough to include in the thirty-four volume Macmillan-Grove Dictionary of Art.  His posthumous obscurity would have seemed surprising in 1799, when the 7th Earl of Elgin wrote delightedly at having engaged the 'first painter in Italy' to accompany him to Constantinople'. Lady Elgin thought him superior to any artist working in London - 'high praise indeed', Aidan Weston-Lewis writes in the exhibition catalogue, 'for among the English artists Lord Elgin had approached unsuccessfully to join his embassy were J. M. W. Turner and Thomas Girtin, arguably the two landscape watercolourists held in highest esteem in Britain to this day.'  In Athens, Lusieri became increasingly embroiled in archaeology and the operation to remove sculptures from the Acropolis, only returning properly to painting as an old man in 1817.  Byron encountered him during this period, finding that Lusieri's 'works as far as they go are most beautiful; but they are almost all unfinished.' Lusieri died in 1821 and most of the paintings he had completed in Greece were lost when a ship bringing them back to Elgin was wrecked off the coast of Crete in 1828.

Giovanni Battista Lusieri, The Bay of Naples from Palazzo Sessa, 1790  

The Bay of Naples from Palazzo Sessa 

A few examples might convey why I found Expanding Horizons so fascinating, and the most obvious place to start is with this painting, described accurately in the catalogue as 'one of the most spectacular exhibitions of the art of watercolour ever created.'  It measures nearly nine feet across and took Lusieri nearly two years to complete (1789-90), working from a room at the residence of Sir William Hamilton.  This room, incidentally, was designed by Hamilton with large mirrors to reflect the bay so that, as Wilhelm Tischbein found, 'if you sat on the sofas installed around the room, you imagined you were out of doors, sitting on a rocky peak above sea and land.'  What I think really makes Lusieri's panoramic view so breathtaking is not the incredible detail of the foreground - figures, buildings, boats - but that view out to sea, where the distant water and sky fuse in a haze of brilliant Mediterranean light. 

View of Rome with St Peter's and the Vatican from the Lower Slopes of Monte Mario

When Thomas Jones first mentions Lusieri in his memoirs he describes him as a painter of 'tinted drawings' and although this seems an inadequate description of the luminous landscapes Lusieri produced, it does capture the way in which they took shape.  It is thus no surprise to find some exceptionally detailed drawings like this View of Rome, sketched in 1780.  A 'tour de force' according to the curators, in which 'the black chalk is handled with an astonishing range of mark and pressure', and where the real subject seems to be the way the light describes the shape of every stone, leaf and tree root with as much care as it illuminates the dome of St Peter's and walls of the Vatican.

Panoramic View of Rome from Piazza San Pietro in Montorio on the Janiculum

These three of the four surviving sheets from a 180 degree panorama of the city lead your eye from St Peters in soft golden sunshine over the rooftops to trees on the outskirts of the city which seem still to be emerging from the grey mist of early morning.  The paintings probably date from 1778-9, and there is an interesting question of precedence because Louis Le Masson painted a very similar panorama of Rome in 1779, commissioned by Louis XVI to decorate the interior of a luxurious dairy he was building for Marie-Antionette (complete with buckets made of Sèvres porcelain) at the Château de Rambouillet.

Vesuvius during the Eruption of 1794

In 1787 Lusieri had painted some moonlit views of the Bay of Naples in which the tranquillity of the scene is threatened by the distant orange glow from the volcano.  He was still in Naples for the eruption of 1794 which was, as Sir William Hamilton reported to the Royal Society, the most spectacular since 1631 and AD79 (when the original Plinius, Pliny the Elder lost his life).  It is possible that Lusieri, like Pliny, was out in a boat - the sketch and the watercolour have no foreground save a flat expanse of water.  The dark volcano is dwarfed by an inverted mountain of fiery clouds and smoke pours from the long river of lava, flowing all the way down to the sea.  In 1799, after the Bourbon court had fled Naples, Lusieri found himself in Sicily, appointed to oversee work on its antiquities, a brief foretaste of the work he was about to engage in with Elgin.  There he painted another volcano, a View of Taormina and the Coast Looking South towards Etna, a near-monochrome composition of grey washes which may record the effects of ash darkening everything except the waves breaking on the shore.

The Temple of Serapis, Pozzuoli  

This watercolour includes a figure sitting among the broken stones with his head in his hand, like Fuseli's The Artist Overcome by the Grandeur of Antique Remains, and probably similar to the way I was gazing at this painting, the tourist overcome by the grandeur of eighteenth century art.  What is particularly interesting about this subject is the way the temple has become an index of geological change.  'The corrosive action of salt water and lithodomes on the monumental shafts of cipollino marble, as a result of bradyseismic activity (the slow rising and falling of the earth's crust) in the area, can be clearly seen.'

The Monument to Philopappos

Although there are relatively few completed paintings from Lusieri's years in Greece, two versions exist of this, a study of the funerary monument to Emperor Trajan's consul in Athens.  One is a watercolour, completed in 1805 and the other, just as beautiful, an oil painting (one of only two that we know of by Lusieri). A contemporary, Edward Daniel Clarke, marvelled at Lusieri's ability to convey 'every grace and beauty of the sculpture, every fair and exquisite proportion, every trace of the injuries of time'.  But Lusieri pays as much attention to the stones at the base of the monument and the grassy slope on which it stands as he does to the frieze of marble figures and the broken statue of Philopappos.  

At the end of his life, Lusieri was visited in Athens by an Englishman, John Fuller, who remembered the artist, still 'labouring with the greatest exactness and diligence' at a panoramic view of the plain of Attica.  'Day after day did this indefatigable veteran pass on the hill of the Museum; and his meagre figure, his drawing apparatus, and the large umbrella over his head, are as much attached to the spot in the recollections of those who have visited Athens, as the monument of Philopappos itself.'  Lusieri's perfectionism was such that it seemed to Fuller few of his paintings would actually be finished.  When he raised this with the old man, Lusieri said (perhaps with a mischievous smile) 'that colouring was such a fascinating employment he feared if he once began it he should never again have the patience to return to the dry details of outline; and that therefore (though he acknowledged himself to be in his 74th year and with a portfolio crowded with sketches), he reserved it [colouring] as an amusement for his adanced age.  Two mornings afterwards he was found dead in the chair in which he had been left sitting the previous evening, his supper before him, like his drawings, unfinished.'

The bright sun was extinguish'd

Source: NASA Earth Observatory

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mt. Cotopaxi Transplant

Forty years ago the Dwan Gallery Earthworks show had two more days to run in New York and you could see the works of Smithson, Heizer, De Maria, Morris, Andre, Oppenheim...

On Saturday, Dennis Oppenheim himself was at Tate Modern for a talk with Lisa Le Feuvre. I thought he came over well, despite a ridiculous interruption at one point, and seemed happy to reminisce about his days doing 'fine art' as well as more recent 'public art' projects. He recalled the radical dematerialisation land art represented as being "like music without sound" and described 1968 as "the summer of the hole in the ground" - although by then quite a few holes had already been dug (Claes Oldenberg's Placid Civic Monument in Central Park, 1967) or proposed (see my earlier posting on Carl Andre's Crater formed by a one-ton bomb).

Oppenheim exhibited Mt. Cotopaxi Transplant at Earthworks, a land art proposal to reconstruct in Smith Center, Kansas the Cotopaxi volcano in Ecuador. It featured a plan and a model 'executed in Cocoa Mat to simulate a Kansas wheat field.' As Suzaan Boettger notes in her book Earthworks, Oppenheim was referring to Frederic Edwin Church's 'icon of American nineteenth-century landscape painting' (see below). Oppenheim's proposal brought 'foreign exoticism to bucolic farm country, the mystique of a volcano to bucolic farm country, and the height of a summit to the Great Plains.'

Oppenheim's transplantation of a landscape reminds me of the Situationist method for experiencing a city anew by superimposing the map of another city onto it. Oppenheim actually carried out a landscape transplant near New Haven, Connecticut, projecting a mountain onto wetlands in Contour Lines Scribed in Swamp Grass. He emphasised the conceptual element of this new kind of art: "altitude lines on contour maps serve to translate measurement of existing topography to a two-dimensional surface... I create contours which oppose the reality of the existing land, and impose their measurements onto the actual site, thus creating a kind of conceptual mountainous structure on a swamp grid." So much for the genius loci...

Frederic Edwin Church, Cotopaxi, 1862
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Dead Sea

Last night some friends were showing me photographs of Bonneville Salt Flats. I immediately dredged from childhood memory the name of Gary Gabelich, who set the land speed record there in 1970. Bonneville was in fact the site for all the land speed records from 1935 (Malcolm Campbell) to 1970: most of the earlier record breaking attempts took place on beaches like Daytona Beach (which has always sounded highly glamorous to me) and Pendine Sands in Wales (which doesn't). The most recent records have been set in Black Rock desert, which may look less spectacular than Bonneville, but which is still a fairly extreme landscape. Water speed records have also taken place in spectacular places of maximum flatness: Malcolm Campbell, for example, sped across the Romantic settings of Lake Maggiore (1937) and Coniston Water (1939).

The Bonneville photographs also reminded me of a trip I once made to the Dead Sea where I convinced our host to keep driving and driving in the hope of finding some spectacular salt landforms (no luck). I had in mind the kind of thing Michel Tournier describes towards the end of his novel Four Wise Men (1982): 'the blue surface of the water was sprinkled with white dots... they were great mushrooms of white salt, rooted in the bottom and emerging at the top like reefs.' Tournier goes on to tell of elephants spraying each other with the salt water and inadvertently crystallising themselves (the kind of thing that makes you question where, in a landscape like The Dead Sea, realism ends and magical realism begins). Salt's tendency to encrust and transform has always lent itself to metaphor (Stendhal's description of love, for example). The transformation of Lot's wife in the Bible seems like a story straight out of Ovid's Metamorphoses, except that the mention is all too brief: "But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt."

Geological formation overlooking the Dead Sea, called Lot's Wife (from Wikimedia Commons)

The growth of salt deposits has continued to affect the appearance of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty. Smithson chose to work at the Great Salk Lake partly for the blood-red colour of the water. However, it wasn't his first artwork based on a salt landscape: Mono Lake Nonsite (Cinders Near Black Point) brought some rocks collected at "The Dead Sea of the West" into the gallery. There is a film of the 1968 trip Smithson made to the lake with Nancy Holt and Michael Heizer, described by Lennie Bennett here as "guileless and optimistic, a self-portrait of three young artists on the brink of fame, scrambling around the ancient landscape with voiceovers by Smithson and Heizer reading passages from books about the lake. Smithson picks up handfuls of rocks that he later incorporated into an installation, along with his famous mirrors. At the end, they set fire to a map of the area; Smithson also used the cinders as part of that installation."

In one of his conversations with Denis Wheeler, Smithson talked about Mono Lake and pointed Wheeler to Mark Twain's Roughing It (1872). There Twain says "This solemn, silent, sailless sea—this lonely tenant of the loneliest spot on earth—is little graced with the picturesque. It is an unpretending expanse of grayish water, about a hundred miles in circumference, with two islands in its centre, mere upheavals of rent and scorched and blistered lava, snowed over with gray banks and drifts of pumice stone and ashes, the winding sheet of the dead volcano, whose vast crater the lake has seized upon and occupied." But Twain does find something of the picturesque in the some landforms that recall Tournier's description of the Dead Sea: "all around its shores stand picturesque turret-looking masses and clusters of a whitish, coarse-grained rock that resembles inferior mortar dried hard; and if one breaks off fragments of this rock he will find perfectly shaped and thoroughly petrified gulls' eggs deeply imbedded in the mass. How did they get there? I simply state the fact—for it is a fact—and leave the geological reader to crack the nut at his leisure and solve the problem after his own fashion."