Topic – archaeology, ruins and the picturesque landscape.

The allure, the ideology, the challenge to avoid cliché.

How do we deal with archaeological landscapes today?

Should I just give up photography? As a tainted medium?

This is too simple a response (not least, it doesn’t make sense to say that media can be wholly compromised). Though for a long while I worked with the arts company Brith Gof [Link], and we explored relationships with place through site specific performance – see my book with Mike Pearson Theatre/Archaeology [Link] and his new book Site-Specific Performance [Link].

In our conversation in that archetypical English pub in Durham, Bianca, Chris and I decided to avoid the search for a definitive solution, and adopt instead an attitude taken from design thinking -

be mindful

and embrace the contradictions – for they are at the heart of how we connect with (archaeological) landscapes

- be mindful and work with the contradictions (iteratively – for there never is a definitive solution).

How?

• acknowledge and break the rules, reveal the constraints
  (eg break the framing in a time series, collage or some other manner)
• interrupt the work performed by the aesthetic with commentary or annotation
  (eg break the illusion, Brecht-like)
• recontextualize
  (eg use the images in an incongruous setting, or as a series that supplies a critical setting)
• intervene, use the images actively as engagement with a place and re-presentation rather than treat them as simple descriptive document
  (Mike Pearson and I adopted this tactic in many “performed lectures” we presented in the mid 1990s).

This all takes me back to a paper I published (very obscurely) a long while back – Critical romanticism on a visit to the past [Link].

I included a discussion of both Turner (see the previous entry [Link]) and another archetypical romantic, Wordsworth.

Wordsworth walked. His poem on Tintern Abbey deals not with the ruin so much as the synaesthetic and constitutive imagination – how place engenders certain responses in us, particularly through memory, but is dependent upon our creative apprehension that organizes the very substance of experience. As one walks and looks. Both Turner and Wordworth dealt with the topology of time – the folding of time, how pasts and presents meet in the composition of the “figure in the landscape”. And how this encounter is ultimately incomprehensible – sublime – prompting us to restlessly experiment with our responses, representations, reflections.

Here is how I summarised a critically romantic attitude:

• local self-assertion as opposed to universal systems (offering definitive solutions);
• an attention to the ordinary and the particular;
• an interest in the darker side of experience in the sense of that remainder which always escapes the claims of a rational system;
• defamiliarising what is taken as given, revealing the equivocality of things and experience;
• reality conceived, genealogically, as historical process;
• an attitude critical and suspicious of orthodoxy, because of the impossibility of any final account of things.

Norham Castle

To continue with the concern that I shared yesterday – the ideology of land, property and labor transformed into aesthetic form – landscape.

Images that disguise history?

(guilty pleasures of the sublime picturesque) [Link]

It is not difficult to identify various components of this aesthetic. (I recall dealing with a lot of this in a couple of classes I ran on landscape [Link])

Consider Turner’s Norham (1798) - [Link]

Key concepts

pastoral | bucolic | the idyll | picturesque | sublime | beauty

Psychology

Ask – What are the pleasures/gratifications of these landscapes?

Ask – How are they connected to people’s sense of identity? National, personal, ethnic?

Emplotment

Some narratives/scenarios embedded in landscape – return and retreat into repose (nostos) | adventure | the frisson of risk, looking over the precipice | escape into melancholy | the walk to eden | sporting pleasures | agricultural labor

Components of a landscape aesthetic

Techniques for mobilizing this ideological field:

• The figure in a setting – person | monument | ruin | artifact

(see my blog category – figure in a landscape [Link])

• Contrast/tension/justaposition/transition – in tone or tonal range (eg shadow and highlight) | in scale | in form (horizontal/vertical, textures/smooth, natural/cultural eg ruin, town, bridge)
• Formalization – making aesthetic through: framing (the proscenium arch) | abstraction | mannerism (especially over-stylization and in the use of color)
• Composition – framing | perspective (linear and atmospheric) | layered planes, stratigraphy, viewpoint (the viewer set back and up from the composition, as audience, never fully involved)

So Turner’s compositions are framed windows or proscenium arches with staged dramaturgies – backdrop, three side flats (two on the right), stage forming the river winding into the distance.

The tensions and contradictions

Past and present | city and country | real and ideal | celebration and regret | melancholy and comedy (the bucolic) | distance and intimacy | alienation and redemption | the everyday and the allegorical

Ask – How is the artist working with and against a set of media conventions and constraints?

Temporality

References to an indeterminate historical time | to a lost golden age | nostalgia | a celebration of the saturated present moment (the sublime moment of controlled shock, and/or of calm repose)| memory as actuality – the juxtaposition of different times in the now

The politics

An absence of any working community in landscape | the status of the observer (usually abstracted from what is being represented) | an escapism (from social reality) |  a contrast between the viewer and the anonymous (sublime) popular masses – vernacular human detail.

Watercolor from 1823 (Scotland is on the left bank)

Norham sunrise – oil 1845 (an exercise in form)

The cultural politics of this aesthetic have long fascinated me. This is not just a new elite aesthetic. Turner was very aware of the politics, manipulating the well-established theatrical scenography to organize his landscapes, staging vernacular dramaturgies of rural life and sporting pursuits, combining both with an experimental and rationalist realism. Like many in Romanticism, he was working with new conceptions of place, time, and relationships between the viewing visitor and the land and its objects, manifested in how travel is organized, where one stops to look at a view, how one looks at the land, what is brought to bear on this apprehension, how one builds landscapes.

The allure, the ideology, the challenge to avoid cliché.

How do we deal with archaeological landscapes today?

I will take up this question in another post [Link]

One of the images that is concerning me – a landscape in the central section of Hadrian’s Wall – largely the work of John Clayton’s conservation efforts in the mid nineteenth century, continued currently by the National Trust

In conversation with Bianca (Carpeneti).

My early morning runs are troubling me deeply …

these encounters with a sublime picturesque [Link] [Link] [Link]

Photo – dawn on Holy Island. Watercolor – J.M.W. Turner (exhibited 1829) (the castle in the background)

Turner’s figures in the landscape (they are on the shore by Cuthbert’s island) indicate more going on than the conjunction of wind, sky and sea.

My concern – something of an ascetic moment, a methodist moment -
guilty pleasures
in landscapes and ruins that attest not to the realities of history, but to what the wealthy and powerful have done to turn labor on the land (and sea) into aesthetic allure.

The politics of land and ownership turned into a pleasant vista.

As I mentioned the other day [Link], Lindisfarne castle is a sixteenth century military fort by a nineteenth century industrial facility turned into a wealthy man’s holiday home (Edward Hudson, proprietor of magazine “Country Life”, commissioned Edwin Lutyens to oversee the tasteful conversion); Gertrude Jekyll added a walled garden.

How can we deny the taste, and this form of the landscape?

Lindisfarne – stairs and kitchen by Edwin Lutyens

The site in the 1900s, when Hudson bought the castle, was still dominated by an industrial facility – what was left of a substantial lime kiln works that had produced agricultural fertilizer. Over by the small harbor (the Ouse) were fish processing plants (mainly for gutting herring – and there are still some remains of the great fishing boats upturned on the shore – [Link]).

And, in a remarkable design gesture, Lutyens took the bricks used as ballast in the boats brought to carry the lime and used them, herringbone, for the new floors of the castle:

Here is how Thomas Girtin, contemporary of Turner, dealt with this conjunction of picturesque history and industry:

My concern

how do we deal with this now?

More thoughts to follow … [Link]

Here is the team – click on the image for a bigger version.

Jeff Dexter. Rocking C’s Ranch, Montana. Cattle country. Looking for Cooler Cave: full of bison bones.

Petroglyph. Dry Range, Rocking C’s.

My first visit to this vast landscape of the American sublime.

Faint and evocative traces of the Native American past everywhere.

Some years ago Sam (Schillace) put me onto a Russian photographer, Sergey Larenkov, who combines old and new photographs of Leningrad/St Petersburg, then – WWII, and now.

They have haunted me ever since.

It’s not difficult to find the photos on the web; it only took me a few moments to find them again – [Link]

“Then and now” “This happened here” – an aspect of the archaeological imagination.

(James Cameron did something similar with Ghosts of the Abyss – Titanic “then and now”)

The old apple tree today. Last year – [Link] Also – [Link]

More – archaeographer.com

Abbey, Welsh, Black Labrador Retriever, nearly 15, at home in northern California

Molly and Emma.

Site of several scenes in “The Sandpiper” – Vincente Minnelli 1965 – [Link]

Ben and Josephine

The BBC is reporting what looks like another publicity scam

Fascination with the Holy Grail has lasted for centuries, and now the Bletchley Park code-breakers have joined the hunt. But what is it that’s made the grail the definition of something humans are always searching for but never actually finding?

Could an obscure inscription on a 250-year-old monument in a Staffordshire garden point the way to the Holy Grail – the jewelled chalice reportedly used by Jesus and his disciples at the Last Supper?

That is one theory entertained by Richard Kemp, the general manager of Lord Lichfield’s Shugborough estate in Staffs.

Kemp has called in world-renowned code-breakers to try to decipher a cryptic message carved into the Shepherd’s Monument on the Lichfield estate.

The monument, built around 1748, features an image of one of Nicholas Poussin’s paintings, and beneath it the letters D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.

[Link]

As Brendan O’Neill puts it

The Grail – because it is mysterious and has always belonged in the realms of the imagination – is a marvellous focus for the new genre of ‘imagined history’, the idea that all history as taught and recorded is a vast cover-up. Once this kind of idea becomes current, particularly with the internet, it acquires a life of its own – regardless of whether it has any basis in reality.

Again we have here a classic and modernist narrative of overlooked clues, microfragments to be decoded by an inspired forensic imagination in pursuit of the truth that is out there but has been covered up by the state, the church, or ignorance, or by superstition. And at the heart – the artifact, mysterious and possessed of aura, veritable witness of history itself.

It is Dan Brown’s Da Vinci code.

I like the association with the internet’s new media – microfragments in a sea of noise and triviality – and all with lives of their own as we track them down in pursuit of ourselves.

All in all – profoundly archaeological.