SUSANNE GRUBE: LANDCAPE AS PROJECTION AND EXPERIENCE SPACE

SUSANNE GRUBE: LANDCAPE AS PROJECTION AND EXPERIENCE SPACE

When, in preparation for Redraw Tragedy, I asked those around me, “What comes to mind on the subject of landscape and catastrophe?” it was scenes of volcanic eruptions, tsunamis or flood disasters, broken cars and fleeing people, in each case the latest catastrophes from near to distant places taking turns in the media, and the possible connection to climate change. However, limited to the field of visual art, a diffuse picture presented itself: a photograph after hurricane Katrina, a painting on the war by Otto Dix, a snowstorm in the Alps by William Turner. Is this even about landscape? Given a subject that spans the globe, the field stretches immeasurably. Considerations that seek to bring together the concepts of landscape and catastrophe in relation to art hardly delimit the terrain because they expand the context of each work. The notion of what “catastrophe” means is subject to various interpretations that do not always have to focus on a horrific outcome. It is in the representation that it becomes clear that there is a before and an after. The frightening, perhaps also fascinating moment of a tremendous destruction or an uncontrollable violence is only explained in retrospect by the search for causes and consequences. At the beginning of the 21st century, man and nature face each other in the arena. Landscapes are part of this complex relationship.

A tree or a rock is not a landscape. A landscape is composed of the interaction of many individual elements to form a totality, which nevertheless always comprises only a section. In a sense, it is the face of the earth, the surface of our planet divided into areas and regions. From the point of view of the perceiver, it can reach as far as the horizon and changes depending on the location and perspective. Therefore, its extent is difficult to grasp.

Different and numerous forces interact here over time in a continuous forming, changing process. Animate and inanimate nature, the visible and the invisible also change at different and changing speeds. Thus the view of a landscape remains a momentary record, whose underlying dynamics can only be read from traces. Landscapes preserve in their vertical layers, both exposed and hidden, an archive of the earth’s history and, contained within it, spreading evidence of human activity.

Because nature and landscape cannot be equated.

Nevertheless: “Even where its counterpart is not primarily natural landscape, it leads us into the open of our nature-embraced historical world,” writes philosopher Martin Seel on the experience of landscape.[i]

Landscape also describes an environment. It is part of the environment with which cultural, social and political developments are linked. Children explore the world there. This gives rise to individual memories as well as collective narratives that can be charged with strong emotions.

In the representation there are set pieces that point to the character or identity of a landscape and forms of extension that introduce mental space.

The intention of the creator:s of artifacts and their reception are not necessarily the same.

“Landscape is a construction in our minds, and each generation relearns landscape.” The quote comes from an interview with Kassel professor Martin Schmitz in the context of the Corona pandemic and an involuntary new desire to walk in Germany. The lecturer and author refers to Lucius Burckhardt, the founder of the science of walking, when he pleads for slow movement and thus intensive perception of the surroundings. In this he speaks very vividly to what many know themselves from travel, the constant interaction of one’s own experience and imagination shaped by narratives, images – a worldwide media flood, and the trend is rising.[ii]

Technical developments require greater mobility as well as higher speeds, also in data transmission. Travelers do not necessarily have to physically go somewhere when moving in virtual space. Thus, computer simulations should by now be part of the pool of formative landscape images they draw upon elsewhere.

The changes affect regional and cultural differences just as much, although they are partially dying out, becoming blurred or superimposed with globalization.

Catastrophe or upheaval – it is more or less dramatic: the point at which history turns! Michael Stockhausen shows clearly how important the temporal aspect is, especially in the distinction from the slower dragging out crisis. The geological time calculation covers incomprehensible sections compared with the span of a human life. But there are also sudden events like earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. In the second half of the 18th century, Europe had both the Lisbon earthquake and the multiple eruptions of Mount Vesuvius, although the destruction of the Portuguese capital was more devastating in scale. At that time, the term “catastrophe” belonged more to the world of theater. The volcano, however, became an attraction for travelers to Italy, including artists and scholars, at the turn of the century, due to the growing attention paid to the excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum. It became a popular subject for the catastrophic image. But the fascination with volcanoes had also taken hold of researchers, who directed their observations to an active nature. Scientifically motivated representations emerged and that of Chimborazo, considered the highest mountain on Earth, gained great notoriety through Alexander von Humboldt’s comprehensive work, the “Cosmos”, in which the “polymath” published the results of his travels. [iii]

Movement and Time – From this point, a thread can be drawn to situations whose variants can be found in many biographical accounts, even in art history. May they be mythmaking – at least a little, they are of interest here as examples of an extraordinary encounter. They tell of hikes and paths through a special area, of pausing and experiencing a moment of inspiration or insight with great consequences.

Francesco Petrarch’s ascent of Mont Ventoux in Provence became famous as early as 1336, when roaming the landscape was not a leisure activity. The poet, who helped found the ideas of humanism, was also a geographer and cartographer. For the history of European art, the Renaissance is considered to be the epoch in which landscape painting was significantly developed. On the summit, “the clouds under their feet,” Petrarch quoted St. Augustine.[iv] Aesthetic experience of nature, Christian religion and scientific interest meet and have a long lasting effect. The introduction of central perspective into painting made possible representations of space that came very close to the perception by the human eye. Only the invention of photography in the 19th century was able to surpass this.

From the end of the 19th century, artists were overcome by an urge to go outdoors that surpassed their previous educational trips, often to Italy. William Turner reported that he had himself tied to a ship’s mast for four hours in a snowstorm. Claude Monet, again according to his own report, almost drowned in a cave in Etretat while painting during a storm.[v] What seemed important to both painters was the authenticity of their experiences in the wild storm and the raging sea, which recognizably flowed into their painting.

613 years after Petrarch on the North American continent: “Standing upright before the burial mounds of Miamisburg (…), I was bewildered by the absolute character of the sensation, by this simplicity that understood itself. “… “You look at the place and you think, Here I am, here…and back there, down there (beyond the boundaries of the place), there is chaos, nature, the shores, the landscapes.”[vi] With this experience of time and place, the painter Barnett Newman, came up with the idea of determining the important role of the viewer, the beholder before his abstract painting.

Like Newman, the author and curator Lucy Lippard moves in a territory that bears human traces. In nature, she wanted to unwind from the hustle and bustle of the art world. “Hiking on Dartmoor…I tripped over a small upright stone. When I looked back over my shoulder, I realized it was one in a long row of such stones. They disappearred in a curve over the crest of the hill. It took me a moment to understand that these stones had been placed there almost 4,000 years ago, and another moment to recognize their ties to much contemporary art.” Lucy Lippard describes this encounter as triggering her investigation into the connection between contemporary art and prehistory. “Later, a second level of that overlay emerged: the sensous dialectic between nature and culture that is important to me as a socialistic/cultural feminist, and the social messages from past to present about the meaning of art…”[vii]

Many of the artworks Lippard discusses can be classified as Land Art or Earth Art, which was able to emerge after the upheavals of the 1960s in art making. Artistic strategies were expanded to include everyday actions such as walking, or methods borrowed from science such as fieldwork, sociology, history, and the natural sciences. Traveling, walking, digging, planting – the artists:inside expanded the field of activity, the works were created in and with the landscape, with natural processes outside the protected space of museums and galleries. The place replaces the object. The viewers have to move because there is no longer an ideal point of view. However, the actions outside, marked by the critique of the conventional art business, brought back there collected materials, stones, sticks, earth, as well as a series of reworked documentation media, maps, photos, films, sketches, texts.

There are or were works, for many have disappeared again in the open air, of extreme horizontal extension like Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” on the Great Salt Lake in Utah, now submerged in water, or rather small in comparison to the landscape, like Ana Mendieta’s “Siluetas,” which were oriented around the artist’s figure and body. Ana Mendieta scattered flowers, sometimes used gunpowder. For Robert Smithson, trucks transported 6783 tons of earth. [viii]

“Over its (Land Art, author’s note) first manifestations lay the haze of diesel and dust: here were men with hard hat mentality, finding their identity far from cultural centers, digging holes and blasting aisles in rocky outcrops…”[ix] Although some ventures of Land Art, have been accused of acting more as destruction of the natural environment, it opened the space for ecological projects and contributed to an engagement of art, culture and nature in globalization until today.