ART MONTHLY, 328 JUL-AUG 2009
by Pryle Behrman
'There are no images that can describe the scene,' states Steven Ball in The Ground, the Sky and the Island, 2008, as his video camera bashes against rocks and fleetingly captures a swirling mixture of sky and parched Australian desert. 'The frame is too small,' he explains. 'Take my word for it.' This eulogy to failure, along with many of the pieces shown in Figuring Landscapes, a series of screenings at Tate Modern conceived by Ball and Catherine Elwes featuring moving image work from Australia and the UK, is self-consciously placing itself against a prevalent strain in the history of European landscape art that imagined the natural world as intelligible, bounded and ripe for human possession. Thus when Kenneth Clark described Thomas Gainsborough's Mr and Mrs Andrews, 1750, as an 'enchanting work' with a cornfield that is 'sensitively observed' in Landscape into Art, 1949, in Ways of Seeing, 1972, John Berger countered: the eponymous subjects 'are landowners and their proprietary attitude towards what surrounds them is visible in their stance and their expressions' and, moreover, that this was a view of nature that 'was ultimately determined by new attitudes to property and exchange [which] found its visual expression in the oil painting'.
The most obvious way that Ball sets out to challenge these normative portrayals of landscape is via the simple expedient of selecting a time-based medium. Depictions of nature in painting or print inevitably confer some degree of calm stasis to the setting, while in video everything that was expunged from the original scene by way of sound and movement pours back in with a vengeance; order and certainty are replaced by chance and contingency. The importance of temporality in any experience of nature is emphasised in Scott Morrison's Ocean Echoes, 2007. Created from split-second segments of footage showing swaying grass heads, the movement of the plants is syncopated with a frenetic soundtrack that resembles a mixture of insect and bird calls. As the editing grows ever quicker the images of nature begin to dissolve until all that remains visible is a field of pulsating, abstract blurs.
As Elwes points out in the exhibition catalogue, many Australian artists have eschewed the genre of landscape in recent years since, in a time of continuing legal disputes relating to Aboriginal land rights, non-Aboriginal artists have been hesitant to depict their surroundings lest their gaze is represented as an illegitimate claim of ownership. With this in mind, Bronwyn Platten goes to great lengths to disconnect herself physically from the land in Meeting Nude Woman Walking on Balls (after Hans Baldung Grien, 1514), 2006. She assumes the role of the chastised witch depicted in a r6th-century engraving by the Flemish artist to create a surreal mirage in which a nude white female, supported by walking sticks, teeters awkwardly on balls strapped to her feet while precariously traversing an unforgiving, arid landscape in South Australia. Platten is obviously poorly equipped for the task at hand and her stuttering progress serves as an apt metaphor for the European traditions and taxonomies that proved to be so inadequate in recording and interpreting the Australian landscape.
Of course not only do the politics of identity and ownership bleed into the aesthetics of any given location, but, increasingly, so do environmental issues as well. Hugh Watt's Blacklaw, 2007, creates a contemporary view of the sublime in which the angular, metallic arms of wind turbines rhythmically slice though a dank Scottish skyline shrouded in a crepuscular light. The neo-Gothic splendour of these monumental machines poses some fundamental questions about the aesthetics of landscape. How should we respond to the undoubted beauty of these mechanisms? Is it OK to marvel at their poetic grace? And is this an environment despoiled by man-made intervention or, in the longer term, saved by it?
Technological innovation is one reason why each generation is forced to re-evaluate its attitude to the land, both how it is perceived and how it should be used. Connected, 2003, by Merilyn Fairskye explores the uneasy place in the Australian consciousness of Pine Gap, the Joint Defence Space Research Facility located not far from Alice Springs and run by the US government. Weaving together interviews, surveillance photography, satellite imagery and documentary - style reportage, indigenous and non-indigenous attitudes to the site are shown to be multifaceted and often contradictory. When construction began on Pine Gap in December 1966, this remote locale at the heart of Australia was suddenly connected to the wider world and, more specifically, conjoined with the military interests of a superpower located in another hemisphere.
Empires are, of course, not only built from such grandiose projects. Through a narrative that draws on both social and familial memories, Ann Donnelly's Political Landscape, 2007, explores the long history of dispossession and domination that followed from the colonisation of her home town of Corcreeny in Northern Ireland by English and Scottish settlers. It is a parochial landscape, both small in scale and rural, and yet hedges, ditches and fields contain evocative traces of boundaries, settlements and conflicts that have raged over centuries. Colonialism has flowed outwards as well as inwards: many of the locals became entwined in the trappings of British overseas trade over the years and also fought for crown and country in two world wars. Donnelly emphasises how local issues often have global resonance as she remarks in the film: 'Empire begins it
little fields with little people.'
Figuring Landscapes is an intelligently selected exhibition that highlights how contemporary artists continue to be drawn to landscape precisely because it remains such a highly contested field. Time and again the genre's key attraction is that it can provide a space to destabilise any notion of a fixed identity and revel in this uncertainty. As hit Rogoff wrote in Terra Infirma: Geography's Visual Culture, 2000: 'It is not scientific knowledge or the national categories of the state which determine both belonging and unbelonging, but rather linked sets of political insights, memories, subjectivities, projections of fantasmatic desires and great long chains of sliding signifiers.'