direction? straight_round

attempt 1. wilderness landscaping

the capture of spectularity

three days spent on grimsey afforded not only the crossing of the artic circle and a futile hunt of some puffins that didn't leave but also an exchange of the various books one transports in a backpack on iceland. we shared the little hostel with a german woman who packs even more excessively than i do: but her five books in iceland provided some good insights into hiking routes and various other bits.


the book that really got me was one with a chapter titled 'nature equals kitsch plus x', by wolfgang mueller. what a marvellous equation. it provided and still does provide plenty to mentally chew over. again and again when you just stare around you and there is just no way of doing anything else other than staring.

m, the woman with the five travel books sat downstairs in the kitchen and each morning declared: 'wow - i can't get over this change in the photo wallpaper over there' - pointing to the icelandic mainland in some 50 kms distance in ever changing light, cloud and snow formations. 'how come they put a new one up every couple of hours?'

the evening before we walked to the northern tip and while i happily snapped away with the camera, every click was futile. it froze in time and single viewpoint all that what could not be frozen.

it seemed ridiculous to try and capture in image something that once capture would be pure kitsch. photography and painting/drawing as completely futile. and then i read about above's equation. the equation, so mueller, renders visual arts in iceland virtually impossible, and land art doesn't even need a consideration to start with.

what a fabulous starting point of my little landart, nature, landscapism module: failure. utter failure to deal with where you're at and what you see. there are possibly some caveats to this:
- what is there to turn to if visual representation is utterly meaningless?
- the romantics tried to romanticise -- make abstract and thus more beautiful -- the landscape. what if it cannot be made any more beautiful?
- sightseeing spectacularity makes you numb and blind; but, relatedly: how do you ordinarily live with such spectacularity?

thus, while taking futile photos, trying to sketch some of the many horses, catalogueing the various colour changes in boiling mudpots, ignoring the clouds above as any sketch would be only considered not real enough and contemplating the folds that thick lave flow makes, i am working my way through the above.

maybe next: some colour schemes, of mudpots and arctic forests (i.e. blueberries, cranberries and crow berries) in autumn beauty. but first a bit more failure. fresh from grimsey:

Too many legs for those cranes

... there are some images that keep stirring around my head. One, are those of Lucia Noguiera's film Smoke (1996) that I saw in parts at the Tate on Tuesday. I wish I hadn't been so annoyed by Francis Alys's posturing and would have gone back again to see this rather quiet film about a performance involving kites, umbrellas, two kiosks, a bench and little else.

But: the other image is captured and a bit more considered than this glimpse at Smoke.
It involves a colourist woodblock print, done in the Great Norther Wastes somewhere in China, and is part of the current exhibition at the British Museum on The printed image in China.

 Country Sentiments/ Xiangqing by Hao Boyi (b. 1938), 1983,
Woodblock print in oil-based inks and colour on paper, c40x55cm

After having seen a couple of printmaking exhibitions in the gallery space of the BM I find the space too stuffy and archival for prints that were so clearly concerned with the world around those who made them, commissioned them and used them - like those in the Mexican revolution or now the 20c Chinese prints.

The texts that go alongside the prints are in part banal, in part patronising: either it's political as in propaganda, or it's not political as it concerns a landscape.

This print here is thus, arguably, about a backward, idyllic rural scene. Done by a generation of printmakers and other artists, the Beidahuang movement, who joined 100,000 demobbed soldiers in the late 1940s to 'cultivate' the plains.

The print caught me (unsurprisingly) for its colourist qualities: those fields of hue and contrast.
Yet, upon closer inspection:

• Why are there so many more legs than cranes?
• And, why does the sedge grow across the birds' bodies? 

Surely, the artist would have been able to match up his separate woodblocks in a way to match bird body with bird legs; and surely he would know that sedges don't grow on bird bodies?

So, why did he divert, subvert or at least distort such realistic representation of rural life in the Northern Wastes. I wonder if the author of the accompanying text is right with their comment that  such "nostalgic scene is typical of his lyrical, colourful style".

So, is political only accepted as party political ideology? Is there not so much more going on, that is not easily read from without? Says she, thinking of the great commentary that Frontier Blues provided of northern Iran, also part of the culture programme in the big city last week.

As for the printmaking:

• many of the prints make explicit use of water-based inks and how they disperse on damp paper. There are some very good examples of that, e.g., Dawn Melody/ Chen qu by Lu Fang (born 1932), 1983
• also: it seems common to handcolour part of the prints later
• as David Hockney mentioned, there is something curious going on with perspective. - It's obvious in some of the prints, such as Sunrise at Nanhu/Nanhu richy by Shi Handing (born 1930), 1981. - The horizon line is variable and objects don't necessarily recede. I need to have a closer look at this and what possibilities it affords.
• as to Hao Boyi, the artist of Country Sentiments, there seems plenty more of him around the inet. Look at his work and the context. Maybe I'll even find something about the missing cranes' bodies?

the weekly growth

of my wild carrot bunch lies already two weeks back. i'd be curious to see what they may look like now. should i ask my dad to venture out to the patch (i'm sure he'd find it) and take a pic?

the intervening weeks have been eventful: plenty of reading and a collagraphy workshop at the print studio. i also watch the imagine programme about david hockney. there's two significant things to take from it:

(a) the problem that is western perspective. how it's catapults the viewer out of the picture plane. and hockney's many attempts to re-enter that plane, by focus on movement and by tracking the many perspectives that our eyes actually see as we watch.

(b) presence and mortality in the countryside. it's somehow a bit clicheed: go back to nature to get a sense of beginnings and ends and the neverending cycles thereof. but it nonetheless led to a series of (quiet) notes to myself.

more practically, i took a step towards my idea of temporality of the daucus carota plant by ordering two accordion sketchbooks - hockney's example of drawing the mess of a yorkshire hedge as individual plants in a moving book is being transposed not the wild carrots but the wildly growing border in our backyard.

i'll fill the book with the border. i'm confident that there will be more wild growing plants in the border than the pages in the book. i know that if i was recording flying insects i would loose - there seem to be virtually none around whatsoever. what change to the fields and the field from a month ago.

the moving imagery i find for this is a bit limited...

here's a slideshow of an early part of hockney's 3 years in Yorkshire: a series of watercolour paitings:


And some more of plein air scenes of the same wood throughout the year:


but lushest are probably the stills of his paintings at google.

zig.zag

... back to the fields in the land from jarman's personal political colour field of digital blue.

this one i haven't watched, just saw that youtube has it as 10-min parts. however, it figures prominently in my mind of the labour and work that has gone into cultivating a field. it served as a reference point for numerous geography fieldtrips to the west coast of ireland. it also figures prominently as to relations of property and the consideration of belonging - and of those who do not belong, by property or presence.

seeing the dominance of the church, pain and the pastoral also can refer to the pain of the pastoral. the pastor as pain. now, there's a few more openings along the way.

but. here's the opening of the field (1990, ireland, jim sheridan)

take a journey

to avebury, with derek jarman (super 8, colour, 1971, 10mins). images rather than a film.

look! it' so full of colours! how beautiful is the countryside!

i saw it yesteday at ngbk's excellent exhibition on goodbye london - radical arts and politics in the seventies.