I've been meaning to continue this small project I set myself in December, to blog a series on my thoughts and experiences of (the) Cornish landscape after a trip I made there. I've had the following post in mind for over a month, and inevitably it has now changed as what seems interesting to me enough to post has changed with the subsequent delay.
The previous posts were made with the landscape still very much fresh in mind. I had been grappling with different ideas of what contemporary landscape is, and how different places present it as art. The Peter Lanyon retrospective at Tate St. Ives was fantastic and felt by far the most stimulating to me personally, out of all the art I saw there.
I'll just put down the notes that I took at the time as I think trying to render it a smooth essay would fail to retain the freshness of my response at the time.
Constructionist? Of landscape - of perceptions of landscape? History of construction.
"impurities" -> localisation
reference
development
breakthrough
abstraction
How to integrate references (D. Dalwood)
Thought shapes - Ben Nicholson - psychology of perception
Danger and potential of abstraction
"to create complex weathered surfaces." Wall text 1952-1955
experience of moving through a landscape - phenomenological.
Mine as the social world, sociality, monuments
"shame" in/on the landscape
Social markers within the paintings
A [symbol]? gesture/abstracted can share meanings.
The social - death, loss, shares meaning with wind, waves.
J. of anger too.
Linking the ancient throughout.
Boundaries between painting, collage and construction.
Red signs like map route-ing on top.
Integrating objects - hosepipe.
Modern materials - melted polystyrene.
It's funny putting it in italics - such an old device to indicate a different voice, a handwritten personal voice. Anyway it's appropriate here, and helps to mark the passing of time.
Looking at the notes, I see my interest in integrating a practice of art with sociality - the lives of people, their experiences, and where that crosses into a politics and practice towards flourishing lives. Lanyon painted with these issues in mind. His use of abstraction wasn't allowed to become divorced from the landscape - the abstraction was materialist, and within that landscape he directly invoked the lives of the people who inhabited and sculpted it - most obviously by painting the old tin mines of Cornwall. The black mark of this scar on the landscape was said by Lanyon to retain some of the shame of the horrors of the tin mining industry and the lives lost underground and undersea.
I don't know if painting can be said to affect sociality but it lends itself well to a kind of tacit exploration of that experience.
(Apologies for the poor quality, I lifted the image from the internet. Source: the arts desk)
The previous posts were made with the landscape still very much fresh in mind. I had been grappling with different ideas of what contemporary landscape is, and how different places present it as art. The Peter Lanyon retrospective at Tate St. Ives was fantastic and felt by far the most stimulating to me personally, out of all the art I saw there.
I'll just put down the notes that I took at the time as I think trying to render it a smooth essay would fail to retain the freshness of my response at the time.
Constructionist? Of landscape - of perceptions of landscape? History of construction.
"impurities" -> localisation
reference
development
breakthrough
abstraction
How to integrate references (D. Dalwood)
Thought shapes - Ben Nicholson - psychology of perception
Danger and potential of abstraction
"to create complex weathered surfaces." Wall text 1952-1955
experience of moving through a landscape - phenomenological.
Mine as the social world, sociality, monuments
"shame" in/on the landscape
Social markers within the paintings
A [symbol]? gesture/abstracted can share meanings.
The social - death, loss, shares meaning with wind, waves.
J. of anger too.
Linking the ancient throughout.
Boundaries between painting, collage and construction.
Red signs like map route-ing on top.
Integrating objects - hosepipe.
Modern materials - melted polystyrene.
It's funny putting it in italics - such an old device to indicate a different voice, a handwritten personal voice. Anyway it's appropriate here, and helps to mark the passing of time.
Looking at the notes, I see my interest in integrating a practice of art with sociality - the lives of people, their experiences, and where that crosses into a politics and practice towards flourishing lives. Lanyon painted with these issues in mind. His use of abstraction wasn't allowed to become divorced from the landscape - the abstraction was materialist, and within that landscape he directly invoked the lives of the people who inhabited and sculpted it - most obviously by painting the old tin mines of Cornwall. The black mark of this scar on the landscape was said by Lanyon to retain some of the shame of the horrors of the tin mining industry and the lives lost underground and undersea.
I don't know if painting can be said to affect sociality but it lends itself well to a kind of tacit exploration of that experience.
The landscape is something that is like a tangent captured in the whole of its being, is it not?
ReplyDeleteThe living is touched by it yet it takes a stand prepared to capture it. The landscape of the mines
is something really interesting in that it is a nearly unlivable place, it has always been.
Wonder about the moving landscape made by people too on the streets. The colors worn by them, the
waves made movements etc. It tends to change all the time. It is not fashion. Fashion is too small a
term to capture that. But a landscape made by people with all sort of things, even gestures. That is
really the urban landscape is it not, rather that tall buildings etc? Or trash as Zizek said in the video that you
had posted.
If you do not mind taking requests may I suggest a series on people? People the way no CCTV would ever capture
them. Rather than in compromising moments which the CCTV loves the uncompromising movement of people with colors
layers that make up a landscape which moves with respect to one another.
Then, why is it that people have been missing them here all along? Do you find them too fragile before the eyes
which read your writings? Or before your own eyes? Or is it that you are concerned in that line of explorations
in your blog with things which are outside people, things which escape people by being too visible?
Kantian Natural! Wonder what I had in mind then!!
But the idea of nature in Kant has two aspects. On the one hand nature is pure law. On the other hand
nature is what gives law. The movement between these two statements is situated in the relations which
exist between the faculties. These relations are in their most active in a concordance resulting from
the game for dominance, a sort of war. This war produces. But what exactly? its something Kant would not say much.
Anyway nature alone is beautiful. But this nature is not what is not touched by man, something which stands
inertly against man's actions. That stand is already something? This is Kantian Natural, I guess.
Hey anonymous. Thanks for your comment.
ReplyDeleteResponses:
People interest me to look at but I don't find the formal, shapely interest in them like I do in objects and green things. I think my photography practice is only a short distance from the kind of tourist photography we make when we go somewhere new, and my expeditions to green places has this feel. The emphasis is on the place.
But I agree that the visual configurations of people and the landscapes they make and the urban landscape are interesting for their ever-changingness. I think a lot about change and the advent of newness (normally understood as fashion) and why we feel something attractive enough in it to perpetuate the change. I think this says something about our sensitivities to wider and subtle cultural developments.
And Kant.. I just read some of the first critique and understand this legislating law-giving freedom. And the way that Newtonian physics gives us a Nature that is inert and removed from us. And mostly I disagree... Although I do like reading Kant!
Cheers again.