Gill, Stephen, William Wordsworth, A Life, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, OUP, 1989)
There are a number of biographies of Wordsworth available ranging from Hunter Davis's popular portrait of the poet published in 1981, to John Worthen's The Life of William Wordsworth: a Critical Biography, published by Wiley only last month. Given Wordsworth's long life and prodigious output unsurprisingly many of his biographers choose to focus on a particular aspect of his life and work. Davis presents Wordsworth as primarily a poet of 'The Lakes'; Worthen explores Wordsworth's early years at Grasmere in more detail than his later life, and looks in detail at the influence of financial circumstances on his work; other critics such as Duncan Wu, Wordsworth: An Inner Life, (2003) take a particular theme - such as grief, in this case - and make it a focus for extensive critical analysis. For reasons of completeness, balance and breadth of scholarship then Stephen Gill's biography published in 1989 remains the most comprehensive treatment of the subject to date.
Gill tries, as far as possible, to give equal weighting to each period of Wordsworth's life. This is particularly useful for a researcher who is interested in overlooked areas of Wordsworth's work and is seeking biographical detail pertaining to periods that are often dismissed as less productive or interesting. The three chapters covering 1806 - 1822 proved particularly useful in tracing the circumstances and influences in the years preceding Wordsworth's publication of the Duddon Sonnets in 1820. In particular the material relating to the (largely hostile) reaction to the publication of The Excursion (1814) and the first Collected Edition (1815) encourage less experienced researchers to read Wordsworth's Preface and Afterword of 1815 with a wiser, more critical eye.
Indeed, Gill's explanation of his approach as a biographer of Wordsworth to be found in his brief introduction provides sound advice for anyone seeking to relate the poet's work to his life. Wordsworth, perhaps, is the most autobiographical of all major poets, he used his life experience as the raw material of his work. What Gill recognises is that Wordsworth was his own unreliable narrator. Partly this is due to the primary audience, for the Prelude at least, was not posterity, but the poet himself. It is ' a song of myself'' written long before Whitman's foray into the similar territory. Moreover, as Gill points out, it is not merely the intentionality that presents challenges for the biographer, but also Wordsworth's habit of revising his poems throughout his long life, incorporating previous 'snippets' of autobiography into longer works, moving sections from book to book, and then re-framing the text in a new philosophical context. For Gill, the life experiences that Wordsworth recounts in his work cannot be taken at face value, but must be set against the extensive letters and other archive material that exist for Wordsworth's family, friends and contemporaries.
The extensive scholarship which underlies Gill's biography enables Wordsworth's achievements and failures to be better understood in the context of the time. Wordsworth's 'conservatism' from middle age onwards is better understood in the context of simply having to 'make ends meet'. His 'radical pastoralism' can only be appreciated though knowledge of his everyday involvement in the life of a rural community. What this biography encourages scholars to do is consider Wordsworth's work in a historical context. The contradictions, apparent lapses of quality, and complexities that face any critic of Wordsworth become more understandable; moreover, detailed biography provides an antidote to the temptation to corral aspects of his work as representative of a particular ideology, or simply to accept then re-iterate Shelley's frustration at the maturer Wordsworth, as someone who simply recanted on the radicalism of his youth.
Sunday 30 March 2014
Friday 28 March 2014
Romantic Ecology - some notes.
Bates, Jonathan, Romantic Ecology, Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition, (London: Routledge, 1991).
Unusually, perhaps, in a work of literary criticism the introduction opens with a description of the author reflecting on the evening TV news on a 'typical day' in early 1990. The date is significant, just months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Bate speculates if an item about the renunciation by the Soviet Parliament of the Communist Party's sole right to rule, would in future years result in 1989 being seen if not as a new 1789, then at least as significant as 1848. It is unsurprising that against a backdrop of changing ideological paradigms that the author prefaces his discussion of Wordsworth's place within the environmental tradition with a more general consideration of how late Twentieth Century scholarship positioned the poet ideologically.
Bate's starting point may seem blindingly obvious, but only after he has made it! The use of terms such as 'Prague Spring' or the more recent 'Arab Spring' to denote moments of revolution seem distinctly Wordsworthian. The author reminds us that in the Eleventh Book of the 1850 Prelude Wordsworth writes of the aftermath of of Robespierre of "the hopeful blossoms of a a second spring" and Authority "putting on a milder face. Nature and politics are woven together inexorably within fabric of Wordsworthian poetic diction.
Bates asserts that whereas for nineteenth century critics Wordsworth was foremost a Nature poet, more recent scholarship concentrated on ideological issues. Broadly speaking two broad trends are discerned. Alan Lui's A Sense of History (1989) and J. J. Mcgann's Romantic Ideology (1983) are both situated within Marxist scholarship; Bates characterises this as a more sophisticated re-iteration of Shelley's lament that Wordsworth abandoned his revolutionary impulses to find "a paradise within". The second tendency is the tacit agreement amongst post-modern academics is that the the study of literature involves consideration of what 'it is not about' - to reveal the voices it suppresses - women or history for example, or, alternatively to assert that literary criticism cannot be about anything, since to decode a text is to re-code it. These interests of 'the professional reader' are contrasted with the non-specialist, who maintains a naive notion that books should be about something. It is this 'naive' position that Romantic Ecology explores by re-assessing the nineteenth century idea that Wordsworth's poetry was about Nature, and the subject matter and central ideas are of pressing interest to emerging concerns regarding the imminent degradation of the environment. The author concludes the introduction with the hope that 'the book itself might be described as a preliminary sketch towards a literary ecocriticism.
This ecocritical project is developed over four lengthy chapters. The first affirms the importance of the Lake District in particular and nature more generally as central to Wordworth's poetry and argues that in his particular approach to the pastoral there is continuity, not opposition between a love of nature and radical politics. Bate examines the relationship between human life and "the silent, overgrowing" objects of nature found in the final lines of The Ruined Cottage' , then re-considers the heroic depiction of shepherds, who unlike the alienated proletariat of Marx, are free and independent. A crucial connection is made between the this poetry of the radical pastroral and the section in Wordworth's prose Guide to the Lakes where he speaks of "the perfect Republic af Shepherds and Agriculturalists. The chapter concludes with the observation that "humanity only survives in nature" reflecting upon how the dead woman in A slumber did my spirit seal is rolled around within the earth '"like rocks and stones and trees".
Chapter two continues the quest to recover the nineteenth century reading of Wordsworth. Firstly Bate traces the etymology of the word 'ecology'. He links the first use of the term, coined by the German zoologist, Ernst Haekel in 1866, to it's definition 'the economy of nature'. This latter phrase has a longer history within ideas of natural religion dating back to the seventeenth century. Discussion of the historical development of natural religion towards secular science enables Bate to weave a narrative that places Wordsworth within an intellectual tradition which includes the work of both Erasmus and Charles Darwin and the American Romanticism of Thoreau. Critical to each of these developments was an interest in the systematic observation of natural phenomena - "Scientists made it their business to describe the intricate economy of nature; "Romantics made it theirs to teach human beings to live as part of it." In Wordsworth, the connection between science and romanticism is felt to be most overt in his prose Guide to the Lakes. Bate points out that this work, which ran to five editions in the poet's lifetime, was Wordsworth's the most widely read book during the mid nineteenth century. This is shown to be of considerable significance in the context of later scholarship. The author points out the paradox that the 'new historicist' literary critics, keen to assert that "poems like all texts are not free-floating aesthetic objects [...]that carry ideological freight", base their response to Wordsworth on such key, canonical texts as Tintern Abbey, and The Prelude, but overlook his most read text - The Guide. "If we are historicise Romanticism we must bring The Guide from the periphery to the centre.", Bate asserts. In doing so he build the case, not only to begin to recover the nineteenth century view of Wordworth but to discover the essentially ecological nature of Wordsworth's ideas and understand his position in relation to current debates regarding environmentalism and green politics.
The book then moves from a consideration of political and scientific ideas within the Wordsworthian view of Nature and Man into the domain of ethics. Bate looks in some detail at how the first four books of The Excursion were received and interpreted by key intellectual figures of the High Victorian era such as Arnold and Ruskin. His in-depth analysis of Wordsworthian influences within Modern Painters demonstrates that Ruskin's conviction that economic and science were inseparable from ethics can be traced directly to his response to debates within The Excursion. For the most part Romantic Ecology is a persuasive, scholarly appeal for Wordsworth to be re-read as a poet and philosopher of Nature. Though it demands that we re-discover the textual history of Wordsworth, the project is far from being backward looking. Bate's point is that his suggested re-reading of Wordsworth connects the poet to contemporary debates within environmentalism. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the final chapter of the book which is centred around a close analysis of Wordsworth's poems on 'The Naming of Places, which, for Bate, have hitherto been given insufficient attention. He approaches these works from the following standpoint:
"History has dominated much recent discussion of literature, but geography also has its claims; we live and die as part of the body politic, but we also live and die in place. The poet is as much a geographer as historian" (p85)
In looking again at such poems as It was an April morning or To Joanna, Bate connects these poems of place to a broader tradition which invites the reader to 'reflect on the idea of England'. Whilst acknowledging 'problematic' aspects inherent in the notion of 'englishness,' a tradition of 'poems of locality' sprung from Wordsworth's sense of connection between the poet and particular named features of landscape. This genre is traced through Hardy and Houseman, then on into the twentieth century in Edward Thomas's 'Household Poems'. Though Bate himself pursues these Wordsworthian descendants no further than the Edwardian era, it is difficult to refute that it continues even yet, through Spender in the 1930's, Larkin and Norman Nicholson in the post-war decades, Hughes through the 1980's and beyond. More recently Duffy, in Stafford Afternoons and the incantation of the shipping forecast in Prayer all evoke a national spirit of place, rooted in landscape, yet devoid of "that dangerous religion called chauvinism".
"....for Wordsworth, pastoral was not a myth but a psychological necessity, an underpinning of the self, a way of connecting the self to the environment. In literature as in life, connection with the external world is dependent on what Clare called 'The Eternity of Nature', dependent on the survival of the daisy and return of the swallow." (p.115)
Unusually, perhaps, in a work of literary criticism the introduction opens with a description of the author reflecting on the evening TV news on a 'typical day' in early 1990. The date is significant, just months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Bate speculates if an item about the renunciation by the Soviet Parliament of the Communist Party's sole right to rule, would in future years result in 1989 being seen if not as a new 1789, then at least as significant as 1848. It is unsurprising that against a backdrop of changing ideological paradigms that the author prefaces his discussion of Wordsworth's place within the environmental tradition with a more general consideration of how late Twentieth Century scholarship positioned the poet ideologically.
Bate's starting point may seem blindingly obvious, but only after he has made it! The use of terms such as 'Prague Spring' or the more recent 'Arab Spring' to denote moments of revolution seem distinctly Wordsworthian. The author reminds us that in the Eleventh Book of the 1850 Prelude Wordsworth writes of the aftermath of of Robespierre of "the hopeful blossoms of a a second spring" and Authority "putting on a milder face. Nature and politics are woven together inexorably within fabric of Wordsworthian poetic diction.
Bates asserts that whereas for nineteenth century critics Wordsworth was foremost a Nature poet, more recent scholarship concentrated on ideological issues. Broadly speaking two broad trends are discerned. Alan Lui's A Sense of History (1989) and J. J. Mcgann's Romantic Ideology (1983) are both situated within Marxist scholarship; Bates characterises this as a more sophisticated re-iteration of Shelley's lament that Wordsworth abandoned his revolutionary impulses to find "a paradise within". The second tendency is the tacit agreement amongst post-modern academics is that the the study of literature involves consideration of what 'it is not about' - to reveal the voices it suppresses - women or history for example, or, alternatively to assert that literary criticism cannot be about anything, since to decode a text is to re-code it. These interests of 'the professional reader' are contrasted with the non-specialist, who maintains a naive notion that books should be about something. It is this 'naive' position that Romantic Ecology explores by re-assessing the nineteenth century idea that Wordsworth's poetry was about Nature, and the subject matter and central ideas are of pressing interest to emerging concerns regarding the imminent degradation of the environment. The author concludes the introduction with the hope that 'the book itself might be described as a preliminary sketch towards a literary ecocriticism.
This ecocritical project is developed over four lengthy chapters. The first affirms the importance of the Lake District in particular and nature more generally as central to Wordworth's poetry and argues that in his particular approach to the pastoral there is continuity, not opposition between a love of nature and radical politics. Bate examines the relationship between human life and "the silent, overgrowing" objects of nature found in the final lines of The Ruined Cottage' , then re-considers the heroic depiction of shepherds, who unlike the alienated proletariat of Marx, are free and independent. A crucial connection is made between the this poetry of the radical pastroral and the section in Wordworth's prose Guide to the Lakes where he speaks of "the perfect Republic af Shepherds and Agriculturalists. The chapter concludes with the observation that "humanity only survives in nature" reflecting upon how the dead woman in A slumber did my spirit seal is rolled around within the earth '"like rocks and stones and trees".
Chapter two continues the quest to recover the nineteenth century reading of Wordsworth. Firstly Bate traces the etymology of the word 'ecology'. He links the first use of the term, coined by the German zoologist, Ernst Haekel in 1866, to it's definition 'the economy of nature'. This latter phrase has a longer history within ideas of natural religion dating back to the seventeenth century. Discussion of the historical development of natural religion towards secular science enables Bate to weave a narrative that places Wordsworth within an intellectual tradition which includes the work of both Erasmus and Charles Darwin and the American Romanticism of Thoreau. Critical to each of these developments was an interest in the systematic observation of natural phenomena - "Scientists made it their business to describe the intricate economy of nature; "Romantics made it theirs to teach human beings to live as part of it." In Wordsworth, the connection between science and romanticism is felt to be most overt in his prose Guide to the Lakes. Bate points out that this work, which ran to five editions in the poet's lifetime, was Wordsworth's the most widely read book during the mid nineteenth century. This is shown to be of considerable significance in the context of later scholarship. The author points out the paradox that the 'new historicist' literary critics, keen to assert that "poems like all texts are not free-floating aesthetic objects [...]that carry ideological freight", base their response to Wordsworth on such key, canonical texts as Tintern Abbey, and The Prelude, but overlook his most read text - The Guide. "If we are historicise Romanticism we must bring The Guide from the periphery to the centre.", Bate asserts. In doing so he build the case, not only to begin to recover the nineteenth century view of Wordworth but to discover the essentially ecological nature of Wordsworth's ideas and understand his position in relation to current debates regarding environmentalism and green politics.
The book then moves from a consideration of political and scientific ideas within the Wordsworthian view of Nature and Man into the domain of ethics. Bate looks in some detail at how the first four books of The Excursion were received and interpreted by key intellectual figures of the High Victorian era such as Arnold and Ruskin. His in-depth analysis of Wordsworthian influences within Modern Painters demonstrates that Ruskin's conviction that economic and science were inseparable from ethics can be traced directly to his response to debates within The Excursion. For the most part Romantic Ecology is a persuasive, scholarly appeal for Wordsworth to be re-read as a poet and philosopher of Nature. Though it demands that we re-discover the textual history of Wordsworth, the project is far from being backward looking. Bate's point is that his suggested re-reading of Wordsworth connects the poet to contemporary debates within environmentalism. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the final chapter of the book which is centred around a close analysis of Wordsworth's poems on 'The Naming of Places, which, for Bate, have hitherto been given insufficient attention. He approaches these works from the following standpoint:
"History has dominated much recent discussion of literature, but geography also has its claims; we live and die as part of the body politic, but we also live and die in place. The poet is as much a geographer as historian" (p85)
In looking again at such poems as It was an April morning or To Joanna, Bate connects these poems of place to a broader tradition which invites the reader to 'reflect on the idea of England'. Whilst acknowledging 'problematic' aspects inherent in the notion of 'englishness,' a tradition of 'poems of locality' sprung from Wordsworth's sense of connection between the poet and particular named features of landscape. This genre is traced through Hardy and Houseman, then on into the twentieth century in Edward Thomas's 'Household Poems'. Though Bate himself pursues these Wordsworthian descendants no further than the Edwardian era, it is difficult to refute that it continues even yet, through Spender in the 1930's, Larkin and Norman Nicholson in the post-war decades, Hughes through the 1980's and beyond. More recently Duffy, in Stafford Afternoons and the incantation of the shipping forecast in Prayer all evoke a national spirit of place, rooted in landscape, yet devoid of "that dangerous religion called chauvinism".
"....for Wordsworth, pastoral was not a myth but a psychological necessity, an underpinning of the self, a way of connecting the self to the environment. In literature as in life, connection with the external world is dependent on what Clare called 'The Eternity of Nature', dependent on the survival of the daisy and return of the swallow." (p.115)
Saturday 8 March 2014
The Making of the English Landscape
Hoskins, W. G., The Making of the English Landscape, (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1955: new edition, Penguin Books, 1985)
Occasionally the fruits of great scholarship escape academia to influence more generally how we see ourselves and the world around us. Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957), or Schumacher's Small is Beautiful (1973) spring to mind as examples of such books. Undoubtedly, The Making of the English Landscape is another. It comes as little surprise that W. H. Auden included it as a favourite book. The poet, who. In Praise of Limestone (1948) wrote:
"...examine this region
Of short distances and definite places:
[...] Adjusted to the local needs of valleys
Where everything can be touched or reached by walking..."
The genius of Hoskins' book is, that as a pioneer of local studies his knowledge does indeed emanate from 'definite places'; however, he manages to tell the story of the settlement of the English landscape - the waves of invaders, each transforming the natural landscape through differing agricultural practices, patterns of settlement and land-ownership - in a way that it becomes a grand narrative, both exciting and absorbing. The sweep of Hoskin's vision may be grand, but his style is modest, tempting the reader to feel that they too could pull-on a pair of hiking boots and discover the story of the landscape for themselves, armed with little more than a copy of his book and a local ordinance survey map.
If Hoskins the scholar was admired by Auden the poet, then it should be no surprise that Hoskin opens the book by acknowledging his indebtedness to Wordsworth, commenting, 'poets make the best topographers'.
The converse, as Hoskins demonstrates, is also true, for he combines the rigour of the scholar with an artists sense of form, movement and development. He concludes the introduction with the following observation:
This book is, then, an attempt to study the English landscape much as though it were a peice of music, or a series of compositions of varying magnitude, in order that we may understand the logic that lies between the beautiful whole. (p20).
Hoskins presents the development of the English landscape as an organic, vibrant process based on what, Ingold, a more recent cultural geographer, termed 'a product of dynamic dwelling', coining the term 'taskscape' to describe the process. The first half The Making of the English Landscape, in five packed, but highly readable chapters narrates unfolding 'taskscapes' from The landscape before the English settlement, to Developments in Tudor to Georgian England. The result of these phases of dynamic dwelling resulted in the underlying field, road and street patterns that are recognisably English. The fact that this account remains by and large unchallenged, almost sixty years after the book's first publication is testament to Hoskin's scholarship and clarity of thought.
The second part of the book necessarily is less hegemonic. The processes that shaped the English landscape since the industrial revolution have, through mechanisation, transformed parts of the landscape to an extent and with a speed beyond the reach of our more distant forbears. Consequently within one generation a place such as Middlesborough changd from a single farmstead by the Tees to an industrial town of over 50,000 inhabitants. Even here, however, Hoskins seeks to present a balanced picture. For example, in chapter 6, Parliamentary Enclusure and the Landscape, Hoskins challenges the then received wisdom - derived partly one suspects from uncritical readings of Cobbett - that the English Landscape was changed suddenly and irrevocably around the turn of the nineteenth century by the enclosure of common land and strip farmed fields. The picture painted by Hoskins is more nuanced; he makes the point that in in 1700 approximately half the arable land in England had assumed the 'open field' appearence so familiar today. Hoskins makes clear that in northern counties particularly, enclosed field system farming had been commonplace since medieval times, and small scale enclosure and the reclamation of heathland and other wild land had featured throughout English history since Anglo Saxon times in all counties. One of the most charming sections of the book concerns the latter stages of wilderness clearence, where in the early Nineteenth Century the last vestiges of the forest, fenland and heath were brought into pasture and cultivation. The process is illustrated through the eyes of the poet John Clare, a rare example of an 'articulate peasant, who was able to present the impact of enclosure, not from the standpont of the economist or political commentator, but from the point of view of the common man.
The final chapters concern the changes to the landscape which resulted from the industrial revolution. The fact that this complicated story is narrated succinctly in less than 90 pages is not only an impressive exercise in precision and precis, but contain touches of ingenuity. For example, to account for the development of the road network in England, Hoskins illustrates this by concentrating on a single ordinance survey sheet - no. 147, covering the area of Oxfordshire and Northhamptonshire near Banbury. Close analysis of this reveals everything from Saxon routeways, Roman roads, green lanes, drovers roads and modern bypasses. In a local area the writer discovers the patterns and histories repeated on the national level.
The penultimate chapter - the landscape of towns - is case-study in the relationship between politics, land-ownership and urban development. The story of the slums of Nottingham is revealled to be one of how ancient grazing rights coralled the development of the city and led to disastrous overcrowding, What is interesting is the closer Hoskins comes to commentating on his contemporary landscape the less able he seems to maintain an objective stance. His approach as detatched observer of the changing landscape is abandoned for a much more personal viewpoint in the final chapter. The Landscape Today.
Indeed it is in the latter part of the book that ome becomes aware of just how much the landscape has undergone significant further change since 1955. Occasionally this is brought home in small details. Hoskins comments, for example. on a particularly interesting Tudor field pattern notable near the small Essex village of Harlow. Undoubtedly this must now lie under the concrete of Harlow New Town. Hoskins writes the final chapter from the viewpoint of his house in North Oxfordshire, and from it he can observe over a thousand years of landscape development. Given Hoskins' acute awareness of the richness of England's landscape history, then we must expect and forgive his occassional lapses into golden ageism which occur towards the end of the book. Objects of his ire include: airfields, Ministry of Defence take-over of ancient landscapes and large old houses, arterial roads and 'overspill developments'. He shares Larkin's fear:
And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There’ll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.
Yet neither men's fears were fully realised. Sixty years on, then, apart from the addition of the M40, you could still trace two millenia of landscape history just from studying the Ordinance Survey map for North Oxfordshire, though it has been re-numbered as sheet 206, and no longer is 'one inch to the mile'. Indeed, the work of organisations such as Natural England, English Heritage and The Landscape Institute have succeeded in promoting amongst people at large a sense that the uniqueness of the English language is something worth preserving. In many respects rural England proved resistant to modernism, in domstic house design in particular modern versions of a re-imagined vernacular has prevailed. One senses Hoskins' viewpoint inhabits the national psyche, a rare achievement for a modest pioneer of local history.
Occasionally the fruits of great scholarship escape academia to influence more generally how we see ourselves and the world around us. Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957), or Schumacher's Small is Beautiful (1973) spring to mind as examples of such books. Undoubtedly, The Making of the English Landscape is another. It comes as little surprise that W. H. Auden included it as a favourite book. The poet, who. In Praise of Limestone (1948) wrote:
"...examine this region
Of short distances and definite places:
[...] Adjusted to the local needs of valleys
Where everything can be touched or reached by walking..."
The genius of Hoskins' book is, that as a pioneer of local studies his knowledge does indeed emanate from 'definite places'; however, he manages to tell the story of the settlement of the English landscape - the waves of invaders, each transforming the natural landscape through differing agricultural practices, patterns of settlement and land-ownership - in a way that it becomes a grand narrative, both exciting and absorbing. The sweep of Hoskin's vision may be grand, but his style is modest, tempting the reader to feel that they too could pull-on a pair of hiking boots and discover the story of the landscape for themselves, armed with little more than a copy of his book and a local ordinance survey map.
If Hoskins the scholar was admired by Auden the poet, then it should be no surprise that Hoskin opens the book by acknowledging his indebtedness to Wordsworth, commenting, 'poets make the best topographers'.
The converse, as Hoskins demonstrates, is also true, for he combines the rigour of the scholar with an artists sense of form, movement and development. He concludes the introduction with the following observation:
This book is, then, an attempt to study the English landscape much as though it were a peice of music, or a series of compositions of varying magnitude, in order that we may understand the logic that lies between the beautiful whole. (p20).
Hoskins presents the development of the English landscape as an organic, vibrant process based on what, Ingold, a more recent cultural geographer, termed 'a product of dynamic dwelling', coining the term 'taskscape' to describe the process. The first half The Making of the English Landscape, in five packed, but highly readable chapters narrates unfolding 'taskscapes' from The landscape before the English settlement, to Developments in Tudor to Georgian England. The result of these phases of dynamic dwelling resulted in the underlying field, road and street patterns that are recognisably English. The fact that this account remains by and large unchallenged, almost sixty years after the book's first publication is testament to Hoskin's scholarship and clarity of thought.
The second part of the book necessarily is less hegemonic. The processes that shaped the English landscape since the industrial revolution have, through mechanisation, transformed parts of the landscape to an extent and with a speed beyond the reach of our more distant forbears. Consequently within one generation a place such as Middlesborough changd from a single farmstead by the Tees to an industrial town of over 50,000 inhabitants. Even here, however, Hoskins seeks to present a balanced picture. For example, in chapter 6, Parliamentary Enclusure and the Landscape, Hoskins challenges the then received wisdom - derived partly one suspects from uncritical readings of Cobbett - that the English Landscape was changed suddenly and irrevocably around the turn of the nineteenth century by the enclosure of common land and strip farmed fields. The picture painted by Hoskins is more nuanced; he makes the point that in in 1700 approximately half the arable land in England had assumed the 'open field' appearence so familiar today. Hoskins makes clear that in northern counties particularly, enclosed field system farming had been commonplace since medieval times, and small scale enclosure and the reclamation of heathland and other wild land had featured throughout English history since Anglo Saxon times in all counties. One of the most charming sections of the book concerns the latter stages of wilderness clearence, where in the early Nineteenth Century the last vestiges of the forest, fenland and heath were brought into pasture and cultivation. The process is illustrated through the eyes of the poet John Clare, a rare example of an 'articulate peasant, who was able to present the impact of enclosure, not from the standpont of the economist or political commentator, but from the point of view of the common man.
The final chapters concern the changes to the landscape which resulted from the industrial revolution. The fact that this complicated story is narrated succinctly in less than 90 pages is not only an impressive exercise in precision and precis, but contain touches of ingenuity. For example, to account for the development of the road network in England, Hoskins illustrates this by concentrating on a single ordinance survey sheet - no. 147, covering the area of Oxfordshire and Northhamptonshire near Banbury. Close analysis of this reveals everything from Saxon routeways, Roman roads, green lanes, drovers roads and modern bypasses. In a local area the writer discovers the patterns and histories repeated on the national level.
The penultimate chapter - the landscape of towns - is case-study in the relationship between politics, land-ownership and urban development. The story of the slums of Nottingham is revealled to be one of how ancient grazing rights coralled the development of the city and led to disastrous overcrowding, What is interesting is the closer Hoskins comes to commentating on his contemporary landscape the less able he seems to maintain an objective stance. His approach as detatched observer of the changing landscape is abandoned for a much more personal viewpoint in the final chapter. The Landscape Today.
Indeed it is in the latter part of the book that ome becomes aware of just how much the landscape has undergone significant further change since 1955. Occasionally this is brought home in small details. Hoskins comments, for example. on a particularly interesting Tudor field pattern notable near the small Essex village of Harlow. Undoubtedly this must now lie under the concrete of Harlow New Town. Hoskins writes the final chapter from the viewpoint of his house in North Oxfordshire, and from it he can observe over a thousand years of landscape development. Given Hoskins' acute awareness of the richness of England's landscape history, then we must expect and forgive his occassional lapses into golden ageism which occur towards the end of the book. Objects of his ire include: airfields, Ministry of Defence take-over of ancient landscapes and large old houses, arterial roads and 'overspill developments'. He shares Larkin's fear:
And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There’ll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.
Going, going.. (1973)
Sunday 2 March 2014
The Politics of the Picturesque
Copely, Stephen, and Peter Garside, eds., The Politics of the Picturesque, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
David Palmer, in his essay on The Picturesque and the Sublime ( chapter 9, p.220) asserts: Ruskin said that probably no word in the language, exclusive of theological expressions, has been the subject of disputes so frequent, or so prolonged as the word 'picturesque'.
The notion that the loose affiliation of ideas concerning landscape, and how a person of taste might best appreciate, or even enhance it, which emerged during the latter half of the eighteenth century, never amounted to a coherent philosophy or ideology, is central to Copely and Garside's approach. Their introduction sets out succinctly the main areas of consensus and debate.
Scholars in field of Cultural Studies have broadly questioned the approach of Hussey (1927) and Walter J Hipple who sought to place a homogeneous Picturesque aesthetic within the broader development of romanticism.
Garside and Copely note in the introductory essay:
'The question that has underlain much recent work [...] has been whether it makes sense in any circumstances to speak of the Picturesque as a single coherent category, or whether the multifarious versions of the Picturesque aesthetic produced by William Gilpin, Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight, by the tourist, the landscape gardener, the painter, the aesthetic theorist, the literary writer, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, let alone others in wider usages and later periods, are not so disparate and in some respects so in-compatible as to resist homogenisation on any terms.' (p.3)
It is noted that Hussey's broad historical genealogy has been largely accepted by later commentators, however Alan Lui has produced a more nuanced picture differentiating three distinct phases of development. The middle of the eighteenth century was characterised by Picturesque influences in landscape painting and design, the period of 'high Picturesque in design and tousism from the 1770's onwards merging into a period of theorisation regarding the aesthetic lasting from 1790 to around 1810.
Recent work has taken two broad, the not mutually exclusive directions: Commentators such as Andrews (1989), Bermingham (1986) and Cosgrove and Daniels (1988), reflecting the growing interest in eighteenth century cultural history broadly read the Picturesque aesthetic in terms of ideology.
More recently, however, attempts have been made to rehabilitate the Picturesque as a coherent catrgory in aesthetic debate. 'Interestingly, these latter attempts have inverted earlier critical assumptions [...] (and have) celebrated the picturesque as an aesthetic that is in many ways antithetical to Romanticism.' (p. 4).
For example Robinson's Inquiry into the Picturesque (1991) concentrating mainly on the writings of Uvedale Price, and his interest in 'mixture' within design and 'sudden variation', the interest in the relation between design elements rather than the elements themselves, is said to have developed in the Picturesques a strategy for maintining 'vividness' where the viewers' uncertainty about whether they are being misled, entertained or challenged by Picturesque objects is integral to their experience of it.
Michasiw in Nine Revisionist Theses on the Picturesque (1992) seeks to reassert the ideas of Gilpin, too often dismissed as a 'naive tourist' in relation to the more 'serious' wtitings of landscape designers such as Price and Knight. 'For Michasiw, Gilpin's Enlightenment game with the artifices of perception and representation, his self aware ironic playfulness, are the antithesis of Romantic mystificatory absolutism, even if the layer theorists of the Picturesque themselves fall prey to that absolutism.' (p.5)
The essays develop current thinking about the picturesque in three broad areas.
The first four essays develop thinking regarding cultural practice of the Picturesque in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Watkin and Daniels examines how practical estate management practices as well as decorative considerations affected Price and Kent's development at Foxley. Charlesworth considers the motif of the ruined abbey in picturesque landscape, particularly in Rivaulx. Stephen Copley investigates the ambiguous position of industrial sites within picturesque tourism through a consideration of Gilpin's treatment of the Borrowdale black lead mine.
The next group of essays have literary texts as their sources. Vivien Jones explores the gender politics of the Picturesque through a consideration of the use of Picturesque motifs in fiction written by women in the period. Ann Bermingham draws a parallel between fashion and the Picturesque in her contribution The Picturesque and Ready To Wear Femininity. 'Peter Garside's discussion of the relation between Scott's decscription of Meg Merrilies and contemporary illustrations of her (...) draws on eighteenth century debates on the social place og gypsies as well as aesthetic assessments of their potential as Picturesque figures.
The remainder of the essays in the book concern later debates concerning the Picturesque ranging from James Whales consideration of the Picturesque as an organising trope for writings about Africa in the work of James Bruce and Mungo Park. David Worrall surveys the attacks on the Picturesque in the later nineteenth century by proponents of the Spencean programme of land use. Anne Janowitz analyses now the language of Welsh artisan radicals associated with the Chartist movement was rooted in the Picturesque. Finally, Malcom Andrews marks the continuance of the debate in his survey of late nineteenth century controversies over the social and political aceptibility or unacceptability of the aesthetic, as it is manifested in photographic images of the decay and decrepitude in the poorer areas of London (p.10).
Key Quote:
There is no doubt that Price felt a conflict between the discourses of farming and of the aesthetics of evaluating landscape [...] in his Essay on the Picturesque Price takes issue with Gilpin by celebrating landscapes that, if not luxuriantly fertile, are flourishing, populous, domesticated, and ned to be worked industriously to kep them so.
Daniels and Watkins, Picturesque landscaping and estate management, p. 19.
David Palmer, in his essay on The Picturesque and the Sublime ( chapter 9, p.220) asserts: Ruskin said that probably no word in the language, exclusive of theological expressions, has been the subject of disputes so frequent, or so prolonged as the word 'picturesque'.
The notion that the loose affiliation of ideas concerning landscape, and how a person of taste might best appreciate, or even enhance it, which emerged during the latter half of the eighteenth century, never amounted to a coherent philosophy or ideology, is central to Copely and Garside's approach. Their introduction sets out succinctly the main areas of consensus and debate.
Scholars in field of Cultural Studies have broadly questioned the approach of Hussey (1927) and Walter J Hipple who sought to place a homogeneous Picturesque aesthetic within the broader development of romanticism.
Garside and Copely note in the introductory essay:
'The question that has underlain much recent work [...] has been whether it makes sense in any circumstances to speak of the Picturesque as a single coherent category, or whether the multifarious versions of the Picturesque aesthetic produced by William Gilpin, Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight, by the tourist, the landscape gardener, the painter, the aesthetic theorist, the literary writer, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, let alone others in wider usages and later periods, are not so disparate and in some respects so in-compatible as to resist homogenisation on any terms.' (p.3)
It is noted that Hussey's broad historical genealogy has been largely accepted by later commentators, however Alan Lui has produced a more nuanced picture differentiating three distinct phases of development. The middle of the eighteenth century was characterised by Picturesque influences in landscape painting and design, the period of 'high Picturesque in design and tousism from the 1770's onwards merging into a period of theorisation regarding the aesthetic lasting from 1790 to around 1810.
Recent work has taken two broad, the not mutually exclusive directions: Commentators such as Andrews (1989), Bermingham (1986) and Cosgrove and Daniels (1988), reflecting the growing interest in eighteenth century cultural history broadly read the Picturesque aesthetic in terms of ideology.
More recently, however, attempts have been made to rehabilitate the Picturesque as a coherent catrgory in aesthetic debate. 'Interestingly, these latter attempts have inverted earlier critical assumptions [...] (and have) celebrated the picturesque as an aesthetic that is in many ways antithetical to Romanticism.' (p. 4).
For example Robinson's Inquiry into the Picturesque (1991) concentrating mainly on the writings of Uvedale Price, and his interest in 'mixture' within design and 'sudden variation', the interest in the relation between design elements rather than the elements themselves, is said to have developed in the Picturesques a strategy for maintining 'vividness' where the viewers' uncertainty about whether they are being misled, entertained or challenged by Picturesque objects is integral to their experience of it.
Michasiw in Nine Revisionist Theses on the Picturesque (1992) seeks to reassert the ideas of Gilpin, too often dismissed as a 'naive tourist' in relation to the more 'serious' wtitings of landscape designers such as Price and Knight. 'For Michasiw, Gilpin's Enlightenment game with the artifices of perception and representation, his self aware ironic playfulness, are the antithesis of Romantic mystificatory absolutism, even if the layer theorists of the Picturesque themselves fall prey to that absolutism.' (p.5)
The essays develop current thinking about the picturesque in three broad areas.
The first four essays develop thinking regarding cultural practice of the Picturesque in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Watkin and Daniels examines how practical estate management practices as well as decorative considerations affected Price and Kent's development at Foxley. Charlesworth considers the motif of the ruined abbey in picturesque landscape, particularly in Rivaulx. Stephen Copley investigates the ambiguous position of industrial sites within picturesque tourism through a consideration of Gilpin's treatment of the Borrowdale black lead mine.
The next group of essays have literary texts as their sources. Vivien Jones explores the gender politics of the Picturesque through a consideration of the use of Picturesque motifs in fiction written by women in the period. Ann Bermingham draws a parallel between fashion and the Picturesque in her contribution The Picturesque and Ready To Wear Femininity. 'Peter Garside's discussion of the relation between Scott's decscription of Meg Merrilies and contemporary illustrations of her (...) draws on eighteenth century debates on the social place og gypsies as well as aesthetic assessments of their potential as Picturesque figures.
The remainder of the essays in the book concern later debates concerning the Picturesque ranging from James Whales consideration of the Picturesque as an organising trope for writings about Africa in the work of James Bruce and Mungo Park. David Worrall surveys the attacks on the Picturesque in the later nineteenth century by proponents of the Spencean programme of land use. Anne Janowitz analyses now the language of Welsh artisan radicals associated with the Chartist movement was rooted in the Picturesque. Finally, Malcom Andrews marks the continuance of the debate in his survey of late nineteenth century controversies over the social and political aceptibility or unacceptability of the aesthetic, as it is manifested in photographic images of the decay and decrepitude in the poorer areas of London (p.10).
Key Quote:
There is no doubt that Price felt a conflict between the discourses of farming and of the aesthetics of evaluating landscape [...] in his Essay on the Picturesque Price takes issue with Gilpin by celebrating landscapes that, if not luxuriantly fertile, are flourishing, populous, domesticated, and ned to be worked industriously to kep them so.
Daniels and Watkins, Picturesque landscaping and estate management, p. 19.
Saturday 1 March 2014
Bansky - The Bristol Legacy
Gough, Paul, Banksy,
The Bristol Legacy, (Bristol:
Redcliffe Press, 2012).
Paul Gough, Professor of Fine Arts at the University of
the West of England, has brought together an eclectic, and multi disciplinary
group of contributors to explore the uneasy relationship between the renowned
street artist, Banksy, and his native
city, Bristol.
Gough summarizes succinctly the nature of the controversy which surrounds calling his introductory essay - Bansky: Painter, Prankster, Polemicist. The nature of each of these labels is subject in themselves to debate and contest.
The book addresses this in three broad sections.. After veteran correspondent, John Hudson' opens by sketching a 'potted biography of the world's elusive artist'; the remainder of the opening essays place both the show and Banksy' work generally in the context of Bristol's long history as a centre of dissent and popular urban protest.
Particularly illuminating is Dr. Steve Poole's carefully researched work on the history of political and populist graffiti in Bristol during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He traces the legal strictures placed by municipal authorities on Banksy's predecessors, noting the influence of broader national developments on the severity of the clampdown, such as the protests leading up to the 1833 Reform Act, and the response by authorities to the suffragette movement.
Gough further develops these themes in his essay 'The 'versus' habit', which points out the longstanding political divide between Tory minded Merchant Adventurers, based in Clifton, and the non conformist entrepreneurs such as Wills and Fry, associated with Bedminster and South Bristol. The statues of Colston and Burke symbolise the divide, each over the years becoming the focal point for dissent. Gough makes the point that 'Bansky's exhibition was clearly attuned to the vexatious histories of his home city'.
The middle section concerns Bansky's show itself. Given the mixed attitude towards the artist within the local authority who variously regarded him as à cultural asset, a renegade or a vandal, then Kate Brindley, as Bristol Museum Service director acted with some conviction in agreeing to the secrecy, total access, and full control demanded by the artist. It reveals a frustration with the 'the hands-off' culture of traditional curation and a desire to find more engaging ways for ,museums to engage with their public. Anna Farthing's contribution places this within the broader move towards constructivist practice over the past decade or so where museums, rather than presenting an expert view, become more exploratory spaces allowing individuals to construct their own narratives, that positions the artifacts within their personal heritage. Farthing proposes that the Bansky show represents a move beyond constructivism, towards activism.
The limits to how 'activist' a museum can actually become is revealed in Kate Bauer's, 'A view from Stokes Cross' an engagingly honest account from the point of view of a volunteer working with the community group 'The People's Republic of Stoke Cross which outlines the mixed response to Bansky's 'assistance' with their 'stop Tesco's campaign. The artist's donation of 1500 posters of a Tesco 'Basic' Molotov Cocktail was felt to be too inflammatory, both literally and figuratively in the context of recent street disturbances.
Herein, one senses, one of the many contradictions which surround Banksy. He remains close enough to street culture and radical activism for his actions to provoke grassroots debate and controversy; yet Kate Brindley, as Museum Director, clearly relishing her moment in the limelight, describes hosting a press conference to the world's press 'in four inch Gucci heels' to launch the Banksy show. It poses the question, can Banksy be simultaneously a global brand and a street artist?
The final section of the book attempts to gauge the impact of the show from a variety of perspectives.
Local journalist, Eugene Brand and the city's Director of Cultural development, Andrew Kelly each contribute articles which seek to evaluate the impact of Banksy, and the exhibition on Bristol's image. Banks concludes, 'what the show did was to make everyone realise that the street art in general and Banksy in particular were more potent global marketing tools for the Bristol brand than anyone had previously dared imagine. Kelly makes the point that as well as changing Bristol's image to outsiders, Banksy has effected how Bristolians, particurly younger inhabitants perceive their native city: '..in a visioning exercise Bansky was chosen by a group of fifty 13 to 14 year olds representing five Bristol secondary schools at a Leaders of the Future event Workshop in 2010, (Banksy was chosen) as among the things that made their city unique - others included Brunel's SS Great Britain and the Clifton Suspension Bridge, TV and media production, Cabot Circus, Concorde and aviation and the Bristolian accent.' (p.97)
It is the cultural impact more than anything else which is seen as Banksy's legacy - though as is pointed out, this builds on a legacy of Bristol's 'cool status' which can be traced back to the emergence of Triphop in the early 1990's - bands such as Portishead and Massive Attack have a global following. In terms of more direct, measurable benefits the impact is less certain. The exhibition attracted over 300,000 people and the economic contribution, calculated by Mearman and Plumridge, economists at the University of the West of England, adds up to an impressive £12.5 miilion resulting in the creation of up to 200 full-time jobs; however, it is pointed out that this in fact represents less than 0.01% of the total local spend.
From a personal viewpoint the most interesting part of the book is the essay by art critic, David Lee, entitled 'Endearing enough, but its not art'. Lee freely admits that his position may be snobbish, but he dismisses Banksy's work as lacking the complexity of serious art, it is one dimensional - 'what Bansky does has nothing more to do with art than the quickly jotted lyrics of a pop ditty relate to literature....in some respects he has learned much from his buddy Damien Hirst: the paintings might be crap but the husbanding of the reputation is pure genius.' (p.125) Although more outspoken in his views, Lee's position is probably close to my own in 2009. My son was at at University in Bristol at the time, I was in the city more than once during the time of the exhibition. I observed the queues. I could have tagged along, but I chose not too. However Lee concedes the fact that so many people did find the show interesting is something that cannot be ignored. He notes that at least the exhibition contained works that non-specialists could under understand: 'Not everyone wants to state at blank white canvases, or blue ones or significant 'sctibbles' and skid marks dispersed across half an acre. They don't want to be told that this pile of dust is more meaningful than that one because this special one was put there deliberately by an artist.' (p.127)
Last week, as I concluded a visit to Palma de Mallorca's recently completed Gallery of Modern Art, I reflected on David Lee's observations regarding 'fashionable', elitist art. Palma's new gallery is lovely, a cool, low-key series of art spaces in wood, glass and steel, subtly lit, tucked inconspicuously within a bastion on the city's sixteenth century walls. The exhibits? Well exactly the kind of incomprehensible minimalist works and random 'installations' that Lee describes above - though he forgot to mention the bill-board sized average photographs and looping, monotonous videos whose epic ordinariness had been rendered semiotically significant by the addition of the odd quote from Barthes and Benjamin stencilled next to them in a mid-grey, fashionably hi-tech font.
Later, as I wandered up one of the stylish boulevards nearby I noticed a ragged homeless woman; languorously she held out her hand in a gesture of need and despair. She sat hunched beneath the window of an up-market boutique. Behind her, framed within a curvilinear, modernista window stood a stick-thin, headless manikin dressed in a sumptuous deep-blue designer evening gown - a 'red-carpet' frock, if I ever saw one. I realised straightaway where 'the art problem' is situated. We live in a culture where we are constantly visually stimulated and challenged, by still images and moving ones, slogans, strap-lines, brands, soundbites all assail us; almost everything we touch, use, operate is the result of deliberate ergonomic design. The effect is twofold. Most of the time the media overload is too much, we simply zone-out or are absorbed by it. However, on the rare occasion that we engage our visual sensibilities, or a critical response is provoked by an arresting sight - like the beggar and the manikin - then the effect is more powerful than most artists can magic, either in a gallery or on a wall. We lapse into a post-modern take on the picturesque; the urban environment providing a vibrant, ever changing, thought provoking 'street art'. It intrigues and immunises us simultaneously; the woman's desperation is somehow neutralised by an accidental juxtaposition which transformed her plight from the socio-political, moral sphere into the pictorial.
Banksy's power is how he manages to reverse this process, transforming, through his interventions, the amoral visual environment into the socio-political.
Perhaps I should have queued with the rest back in 2009.
Uncommon Ground - Land Art in Britain: Landscapes and Environments
Uncommon Ground - Land Art in Britain 1966 -1979, Mead
Gallery, University of Warwick, February 2014.
Landscapes and Environments
Parks and Commons
(p.78-79)
In 1980 it was
suggested by Marian Shoard, in her book,
This Land is Our Land, that over 87% of Britain's land is privately owned. Given that reality, even an action as
simple as walking in the British landscape has an implicit politics and
necessarily involves a complex tracking of owned, managed and demarcated space
Streams, Rivers and Estuaries (p. 83 - 86 )
Given that Wordsworth's Duddon Sonnets are a key point of
reference for my project, then the role that rovers played in the Work of Long,
Fabian Miller and Nash provides an interesting link to romanticism, however the
minimalism and 'spare' aesthetic of Land art represents more of a radical
critique of tradition rather than a revival or homage.
Uplands (p.86 - 87)
Similar positioning can be noted in relation to Uplands
and mountainous terrain:
Long's contribution to When Attitudes Become Form (Kunsthalle Bern, 1969) - a bold statement
relating to his work, A Walking Tour in the Bernese Oberland - might be taken as a parody of the Romantic
journey undertaken by nineteenth century poets and painters, and a denial of
what we might expect of the scenic tour.
Uncommon Ground: Themes and Contexts
Uncommon Ground - Land Art in Britain 1966 -1979, Mead
Gallery, University of Warwick, February 2014.
Themes and Contexts
1. Prehistory
Well, England is covered with huge mounds and converted
hills and probably you know Stonehenge, although that is one of the least
impressive of all the things. In fact most of England had had its shape changed
- practically the whole place, because it has been ploughed over for centuries
- rounded off.
Richard Long at 'Earth'
symposium, Cornell Univerity,
Ithaca, NY, 1969.
When Long made these comments in 1969 he echoed a widely
held sense of fascination with the ancient and prehistoric past on the British
Isles.
Some of the distinctive aspects of the 1970's experience
of prehistory are lost to contemporary viewers. The intimacy of getting to know an ancient site by walking on
it - as Long had done while making his work Silbury Hill (1970-71) - is now
prohibited. (p. 60)
2. Environment
A useful distinction is made between Environmental Art
and Land Art.
It is important here to clarify the difference between
Land art and environmental art, because
not all works of Land art are works of environmental art and not all
environmental art deals explicitly with landscape.
For example, one might be able to read a concern with
environmental change into the transient effects of tide and weather captured in
Garry Fabian Millers (p.54) Sections of England: Sea Horizons , 1976 -77, but
these were not explicitly the subject of the work. .
3. Historical and Cultural Context pp. 70 - 76
Back to the land: The emergence of land art coincided
with a growing interest in self sufficiency; Writers such as John Seymour
popularised 'growing your own' and the period saw the emergence of
organisations such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. There was a growing
interest in traditional folk art and music and following the moon landings in
1969, the idea of a Gaia Hypothesis - formulated by James Lovelock - gained
popularity
Wilderness and open air locations were a key ' canvas'
for many British Land artists, it is
useful to note that campaigns in the 1930's had opened up many remote and
upland areas, and access to these was facilitated by a significant increase in
car ownership and road improvements which happened in the twenty years
following the Second World War. Ironically, perhaps, it was the increase in car
ownership which enabled walking and hiking to emerge as popular past-times.
There is an interesting discussion of Land art's
relationship with romanticism (p.73) The point is made that it is not
surprising that young artists were keen to assert their independence from the
traditions of English landscape and rural traditions. Indeed the appearance of
much of the work places it visually within the interest in minimalism and
conceptual art emerging in the 1960's. - there is a sense in the spirit of
radicalism in Art schools such as St
Martin's and Hornsey that it was essential to establish a break with tradition
and an international outlook.
With the passage of time it now is possible ' to consider
the turn to landscape of the 1960s and
1970s as a way of resisting, or at least eluding the demands of linguistic
Conceptualism and the high-minded
austerity of the Avante Garde. In this sense, to make a work of art by the act
of walking, for example, can be understood as the assertion of a vital freedom.
To engage directly with natural materials, whether earth, stones, driftwood,
great, water or sunlight, or to make site-specific 'sculptures' in open spaces,
is to open up space in which meanings are unpredictable, and in which the
histories and associations of place inevitably become part of the work. (p. 73
- 74)
Uncommon Ground - Land Art in Britain
Uncommon Ground - Land Art in Britain 1966 -1979, Mead
Gallery, University of Warwick, February 2014.
The visit to the above exhibition a couple of weeks ago
has helped me clarify a number of the themes in Voceti. I'm pleased that I
bought the companion catalogue too, not only does it expand on some of the
individual artist's ideas, but the sections on broader cultural themes help put
my project into context.
Artists - some
notes:
Keith Armatt 1930 - 2009
A leading figure in the British conceptual art movement,
he moved into photography which questioned the legacy of the picturesque in the
British landscape. His work 'The Visitors (1976) and A.O.N.B. (1982 - 84) take somewhat
disallusioned view of the celebrated 'scenic route' in the Wye Valley. (p.16).
John Hilliard b. 1945
Hilliard often precedes his expeditions into landscape
with sketches in which an idea is formulated and then searched for in real
space, thus reversing the process of naturalism or the scenic in photography.
(P.38).
John Latham, 1921
- 2006.
Most notable is his work with the Art Placement Group
(APG) where his enquiry into derelict land led him to propose the designation
of huge shale bings in West Lothian, Scotland as monuments.
APG's axiom that
the context is half the work, could stand as a mantra for much of the new
landscape art being made on Britain the 1960s and 70s.
Lathams theories of the importance of the axis of time
and event (rather than space and matter) and his belief in the efficacy of
visual art as a language, present profound challenges to conventional
understandings of relationships between humans and their environment, asking us
to see ecology as primarily time--based rather than merely spatial or material.
(p.44).
Richard Long b. 1945
Stone Circle (1972) is one of the first stone circles
that Long made ....there are 61 stones,selected from a beach not far from his
home in Portishead. .. his has been one of the most consistent and intense
engagements with the subject (land art)
(p. 46).
(NB. Belonging versus exile)
Roelof Louw b. 1935
By 1969 he had taken a decidedly Conceptual turn, making
works that were executed in the landscape (...) to a set of procedural
specifications
Louw is also an accomplished writer and thinker. (...). These include the work of landscape
designers such as Lancelot Capability
Brown, Humphrey Repton, and Frederick Law Olmsted (all interested) in the
theory of the picturesque and the idea of genius of place. (p.48).
Anthony McCall b. 1946
Landscape for fire (1972) is a staged event (..) scored
in three movements and involved the choreographed filling and lighting of pans
of gasoline arranged on a six by six
grid.
....his work is suggestive of ancient rituals such as the
lighting of beacons to mark auspicious events.
(p.50)
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