-Neil Young
What does it mean to capture a landscape? The exhibition Anywhere but Here poses this question by probing the settings and context of the Landscape tradition. The impulse to depict seen or imagined surroundings manifests across continents and eras. These images predate the imposed division between human and Nature.
I.
Landscape’s maturation occurred only some mere 500 years ago within the overlap between the Renaissance and the Age of (so-called) Discovery. Inter- and intra-continental trade fueled a flocking to urban centers, where a growing middle class sought small luxuries. For the first time, these merchants could afford to focus on their physical dwellings rather than the pieties of a heaven-sent afterlife. Landscape pictures form a missing link in this cycle. Dredged swamps, dug canals, cleared forests made room for moving people, who craved and purchased pictures of the land changing before their very eyes.
Whether the image is nostalgic, documentary, elegiac or optimistic, Landscape is intrinsically political. Powers on either side of construction, nation-building, or empire lay easy claim to Landscape, as they do to the land itself. Unholy kings who rule by divine right carve up God’s green Earth and the people get prints of the place all throughout the fall. Somewhere in the midst, wilderness changed from something humans escaped from into a place that we escaped to.
II.
To become aware of a setting’s impact is to begin to feel in place. When we understand ourselves at the effect of our surroundings–the smells, the light, the temperature–we become present. The apex of such presence–losing our enumerative faculties to the sensation of moment and place–is the Sublime: the awestruck humility, terror, and wonder at our individual life in the scope of the incomprehensibly vast and complex. Our cognitive functions, our very self evaporates into our immediate setting. It is not to see the wind blow reeds, nor to watch the sun set in brilliant color. It is to be windswept, to feel our skin gilded by the golden hour.
Experiencing the Sublime changes us from our own subject into Nature’s object. Landscape artists, particularly of the Romantic era, claim the Sublime as their great topic. These pictures attempt to transmit the obliviating Sublime moment to anyone who stands in front of it. Few works of art, and fewer Landscape pictures accomplish this; it’s a high, specific bar.
What many Romantic Landscapes in fact do, is turn the Sublime’s experience of subjection into an object. No matter how breathtaking the painting, these deftly designed works render the Sublime packaged, circumscribed. In the imaginary war between human and Nature, the victory is not to have climbed the mountain, but rather to have pictures of the mountain climbed. The victory is of course pyrrhic.
III.
Today the most common forms of Landscape images anesthetize us to the Nature we refuse to recognize in ourselves and in our immediate surroundings. This is especially pressing to the some 55% of the world living in urbanized places. If we are lucky enough to have a window, the view outside may not be pretty. Instead, we are placated by the rolling hills of the Windows™ desktop. The machines we labor from dangle wondrous vistas in front of us like a carrot hanging from a hamster wheel.
Others of meager fortune are afforded a chance to create our own breathtaking scenes at the paint-n-sip or with the help of a Youtube video. The tragedy is not that the mass availability of artmaking results in a glut of amateurly painted stock images. It’s that the value of the experience stems from the standardization of beauty into consumable fantasies of settings that remain out-of-reach. These images blind us to the roots that crack the sidewalk, the pigeons nesting in the cornice. Furthermore, to paint by tutorial or to open a Macbook to a starry screensaver is to distort and compress the creative impulse into something neat and standardized.
The Public Broadcasting Service aired “The Joy of Painting” in 1983, just as President Reagan was slashing the EPA’s budget. Curiously, Reagan both fenced off a few federal acres as parkland, while leasing other large swaths to gas, mining and oil companies. In preserving a few pristine retreats, the administration convinced us that Nature was out there somewhere, apart from the desolated lands that grew the economy. Bob Ross-type pictures of the snow-capped mountain reflected in the crystalline lake are consolation prizes in a game structured against the players.
IV.
My little dirge brings us to a windowless basement—one of thousands here in the most densely built environment in the world. Settings like New York offer strong proof that Nature abhors a vacuum. We picture the Sublime exclusively in the brooding forest or the silent desert, but it’s as likely to find us in the city. It is feeling dissolved within the crowd, seeing thousands of lights twinkling in the night, our body moving in time with the machine. It is the experience of the polycell. The city is not the antithesis to Nature, but rather an idiosyncratic outgrowth: the mycelial network above ground evolving in real time.
It’s true that compared to a swamp or forest, the metropolis offers monochromatic and claustrophobic views. To recuperate the absence of organic grandeur our cities engender a deeper sense of being in place with each other and in our own minds. Traditional Landscapes insist that salvation belongs to one person in vast space. A city offers the chaotic harmony of bees humming with the hive.
A city’s gray compartments stoke this chaos, and force us deeper into the wilderness of our imagination. The outcome is art that both marks and makes an irreducible sense of place. From this vantage point, the artists of Anywhere but Here humbly reflect their surroundings into an environment capable of nurturing all life. This survey of Landscape's many modes–mournful, imaginative, polemical–does not simulate the Sublime, but longs for its harmony as a way of being. These artworks offer dispatches towards the widest scope of our collective home, remade and re-mended outside of our own image.