ART&RESEARCH

Raymond Williams poses in his book, The Country and the City, “A working country is hardly ever a landscape. The very idea of landscape implies separation and observation.”¹ Williams goes on to say that to turn land into landscape requires a set of socially negotiated ideas, a decision to impose a way of seeing onto a place, and that this is “not a kind of nature but a kind of man”. This framing of land as landscape that Williams points out underscores the significance of addressing the way in which we see landscape, and that our relation to memory, culture and history are main players when forming such a view.

In nineteenth-century Europe, the notion of the Picturesque developed into nostalgia for a recently lost landscape, a desire for the cultivated landscape that was disappearing with industrialization. In spite of this, the Picturesque was to have a great influence on how people were to see landscapes in America. One of the places on which the Europeans and the descendants of European immigrants projected their Lorrain-inflected gaze was the Hudson Valley, and in particular the Hudson Valley Highlands, where the mountains of West Point surround the river passage, all of which was cloaked in memories from the recent War of Independence. At West Point I made a series of photographs that became important for my research.

Working at the United States Military Academy at West Point on April 30, 2003 (the “last day of the Iraq war”, according to George W. Bush’s declaration on May 1st), my job on the site was to unfold the Claude Lorrain Glasses and hold them one by one in front of the large-format camera lens. Kelly, the photographer, controlled the shutter, and our assistant, Jay, recorded the different exposure times and colors and mixtures of filters. The view I observed reminded me of a stage set from classical theater, the mountings like screens framing the stage of the Hudson River. When the round shape of the Claude Lorrain Glass is held in front of the camera lens, the gaze is drawn to the center, as if the form of the glass is placed on top, and makes the penetration into the landscape clearer. I looked at the photographs just taken: I saw the river flow towards me and the shape of the instrument made its movement more vivid. A horizon is clearly there, at times taking on more clarity and at other times more diffuse, depending on the color of the filter: Yellow Dawn, Rose Twilight and Moonlight Blue. While looking, I became aware of eyes that see me and the view in the same moment, the system of surveillance of the Military Academy, the tourists with their cameras dipping in and out of the vista, and all the registering eyes of the satellites high above this beautiful landscape.

My method for See and Seen was to research the different historical accounts and the contexts of the representation of landscape. I was not so much interested in the accumulation of knowledge but in how I could put it to work in general to reproduce the landscapes through various artistic techniques and strategies. I adopted different roles when I approached the landscapes through mimicry – the copyist, the tourist and the art historian – used in both projects as routines for seeing.

My artistic method proceeded from two different traditions about how to approach an historical painting, namely the artist’s and the scholar’s. I should point out that it is those conventions that identify and give meaning to the artists and art historians I refer to, for these terms are utilized in my work as two “routines” to consider when approaching painting. The first routine was that of the artist who remakes the picture in a desire to learn about its coming into being; the other was that of the art historian who reveals the subject by analyzing and gathering information about it and its context.

Part of my roadmap of art projects that became important for my research was Grand Tour, an exhibition I produced and which toured five art institutions in Europe between 2005-2007. Grand Tour broadly related to traveling, seeing landscape and cultural places in Italy, as well as dealing with a gay cruising gaze.

During my research, I did find a way to work with my material as an archive and a kind of machinery for seeing. This involved an attempt to detect a form of complexity within historical representations, through a schematic, clear, lucid presentation in my installations – simultaneously providing me with the possibility of changing the focus and the narrator. With this method, I found that the gay man’s gaze paradoxically mimics the amateur’s love for paintings in a museum, as well as the art historian’s research, all of which intersect in my installations in the exhibition space.

Henri Lefebvre makes a connection between the experience of looking at a painting and a face or façade, saying that the face of the painting always meets the viewer with the same logic - the painting turns in the direction of anyone approaching it. Therefore, the museum gallery is a place like no other, in the sense that we move in this space in relation to this encounter. Despite the seemingly complex relations that create the contexts within a museum, this is a public space as negotiated as a supermarket or a hospital. We know, and our bodies recognize, how to act in these kinds of spaces and we bring our eyes to focus on the subject suggested by the context. To look at paintings in a museum is an active bodily experience.

I created a system to underscore this bodily experience of seeing. I designed tables made for studying books, paintings and other material presented on them. And I placed viewing instruments, like magnifying glasses and field scopes, to propose an installation made for the viewer to explore the act of looking. The installation was oriented in one direction to help the viewer move from viewing point to viewing point. In this system I juxtaposed pairs of images – often a reproduction of a painting and my after images. I tried to create an installation that involves the viewer in the negotiation process that constructs the way we perceive pictures in art history. I use the original paintings as a starting point, since they often relate to an existing canon within the history of, in this case, Western art, i.e. the designated masterpiece as style and norm, a formula that I would like the viewer of my installations to scrutinize.

I would also like to add that the system used in both my See and Seen exhibition as well as in Grand Tour became a kind of self-portrait; all was established in relation to the embodiment of my gaze: the scale of the objects, the way the objects were spread on the tables, the height of objects in relation to my own height. In fact the supports, such as benches and chairs, are there to help the viewer to see from my vantage point. I know that I can never know what the viewer sees. However, in the exhibition system, I have seen myself seeing, a kind of specter of me appears when the viewers are in my installation, and when I install the work I am also imagining the viewer leaning over my tables, looking into my field scopes. I am, then, there with the unknown.

Response

John Rajchman

Matts’ interesting thesis research into notions of landscape in classical and contemporary settings intersects with the work of a number of historians. But in what sense does this research belong to the “nameless science” we are debating today in New York? What in fact is this “nameless science” in which Giorgio Agamben saw a paradigmatic case in Aby Warburg’s own long, mad, private research project also concerned with memory of European painting at an earlier time in history? The question I would like to open for discussion thus has to do with the larger framework of this symposium.

One issue is the relationship of “nameless” research not simply with knowledge, but also with changing models of what knowledge is or does. What is the role of images or pictures in knowledge, in the arts and sciences? What are their relationships with one another? In that context, one could imagine analyzing how the aesthetic concepts of landscape vary with corresponding knowledge about what a milieu or environment is in the sciences (as, for example ,in Foucault’s analyses of bio-power). Of course, it then matters whether landscape is used in a way that contrasts with the city or rather whether one can speak of urban landscapes.

In literature and in cinema, we see many ways of how characters figure in landscapes. For example, with the heightened sensibilities of characters inhabiting strange new disconnected or absent spaces. Looking at Neo-realist cinema, Deleuze analyses the condition of an entirely new relation between cinema and thinking, in-between cinema and research - and also notices peculiar urban landscapes or percepts in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. In the larger tradition in painting that Matts Leiderstam is looking at, there is an important distinction of this sort to which I would like to draw attention.

In her book The Art of Describing (1983), Svetlana Alpers analyses a shift from window to map in Dutch masters of the 17th century. Written under influence of Foucault, the book is one attempt to counter or qualify Panofsky’s question about perspective and its relation to knowledge and related ideas about what an image or picture is. In Dutch painting, Alpers observes that the window is replaced by the map. There is a new relationship to knowledge, much less textualist or dependent on the principle of ut pictura poesis. That type of analysis differs from how Matts starts from the mythological themes in classical works. Mapping landscapes belongs to an art of describing rather than depicting them as if from a window or through a frame.

Today we might see landscapes as part of a larger series of relations of drawings or pictorial techniques not related to classical perspectival conventions, but rather to architectural plans, even musical scores or theatrical scripts. The problem of map or diagram, as distinct from window or frame, is one which has generated a large volume of literature. For example, in his essay directed against Fredric Jameson in a collection called Critical Landscapes, Mark Wigley draws attention to a highly suggestive use of the notion of map or diagram and a sense of being lost in space in Walter Benjamin’s autobiographical writings. But it is Gilles Deleuze who perhaps goes the furthest in the development of the notion of map and its critical applications, when he contrasts carte and calque, mapping and tracing as if from a prior model.

An interesting application in seeing landscape is the notion of moving eyes and the role of the camera in substituting them in cinema. For example, a traveling shot has a different relation to landscape than a panoramic shot. It is suggestive, in this regard, that the Chinese (then Japanese) hand scroll tradition is seen as proto-cinematic since Eisenstein, is also one which departs from the classical idea of the window.

The notion of diagram or of mapping in Deleuze’s hands – in relation to non-probalistic chance in pictorial facts painted or studied by Francis Bacon, for example - involves a kind of research carried out by artists or filmmakers which might be called “nameless” in a peculiar sense. That is a bit different from Aby Warburg’s catastrophically disappointed faith in humanist Wissenschaft not governed by prior method and at odds with instituted or clichéd ways of seeing and talking.

I stress such distinctions between mapping and depicting landscapes, and the kinds of research they involve, because it seems to me that much contemporary art and architecture has focused on the issue of map or diagram rather than the more classical notions of frame or window. In the research projects presented as part of the last Shanghai Biennial, for example, it seems that the issue of mapping new translocal kinds of urban space (or landscape) was much more central than the tradition of classical window with which Matts is concerned. My question then is this: is Matts’ return to an earlier European convention of the window a deliberate attempt to counter this trend? If not, what then is its purpose? What is its relation to nameless research?

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