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Leonhard Emmerling
Joachim Ritter named as a symptom of Modernism its “Entzweiungsstruktur” [structure of dichotomy], and he specifically derived it from the phenomenon of landscape. [1] Ritter identifies the first written appreciation of nature as aesthetic phenomenon, Petrarch's report of the ascent of Mont Ventoux in April 1335, as the decisive milestone. Just as stepping outside the context of nature was the precondition of the technological exploitation of nature as a resource, and the reification of nature was the precondition of its aesthetic appreciation as a landscape, so every turning towards nature has nature's loss as its precondition. [2]
Landscape, according to one of Ritter’s hypotheses, does not exist but is created by the observer as an aesthetic phenomenon. [3] By viewing nature as landscape, nature disappears or, to put it even more drastically, nature cannot be seen. [4]
It remains to be determined whether there is much consolation in Ritter’s claim that viewing landscape constitutes a transformative reclamation of nature and a means of redressing the damage inflicted on it by human beings. But it seems certain that any act of transformative viewing, causing nature to disappear and making it reappear as landscape, is motivated by the longing for reconciliation with nature through empathy.
However: Empathy for what? Nature does not speak to us; at best we respond to it. All attributes we are assigning to it (the violent sea, the majestic mountains, the soft breath of evening), are anthropomorphizing projections. So perhaps being touched by nature is to a lesser extent the result of what it presents, but rather of what it represents for us; to a lesser extent does it address and touch us, but it is rather a matter of us longing for being addressed and touched as we are unable to cope with the fundamental solitude in which we live as discontinuous beings .[5]
It is not nature addressing us but us addressing ourselves through looking at nature. What we empathize with is ourselves.
These observations should simply be seen as insisting on a distance that has to be expected just for logical reasons as the difference between a perceiving subject and a perceived object (and which goes to the point that one has to argue similarly for an irreconcilable strangeness of the subject reflecting itself and the object of its reflexion – the very subject. Self-reflexion is the reflexion on me as something else. There is a rift right through us).
Artists like Bill Viola would hardly share my view on nature. In his wonderful video Chott el Djerid (1979) he filmed mirages in the sand and salt desert of the same name in the North of Tunisia. He wrote in an accompanying text: “If one believes that hallucinations are the manifestation of some chemical or biological imbalance in the brain, then mirages and desert heat distortions can be considered hallucinations of the landscape. It was like physically being inside someone else’s dream.” [6]
In a preliminary diary entry, in which he declares his intention to travel to a place at the other end of the world, he wrote: “You finally realize that the void is yourself. It is like a huge mirror for your mind. (…) I want to travel to this place and stand and watch with my camera. Watch the days pass, watch the light change, listen to the landscape.” [7]
The analogy of chemical/ biological and optical processes leads Viola to the formulation of hallucinations of the landscape. In the context of his work, it is obvious that he assigns an active role to landscape (he does not differentiate between landscape and nature): It is able to dream. He does not pursue the direction reminiscent in the passage about the function of emptiness as a mirror of the mind (which, according to my perspective, signifies landscape/ nature as function of psychic processes and corresponding projections). Viola comes back to his notion of the active role of landscape: It talks. Or could there be any other interpretation of him writing that he wanted to listen to it?
Since the year 2000, the German artist Peter Rösel has travelled regularly through the desert of Namibia to paint mirages. These can be observed there with particular frequency as cold air over the sea and hot air over the desert collide at the shoreline, creating strong turbulences. Rösel’s „Fata Morgana Painting Project“, in addition to other aspects (as discourse on painting: Rösel refers, amongst other things, to Plato’s verdict on painting as a duplicitous medium and forces this by displaying fictitious objects in a virtual medium), touches on the problem of awareness of and empathy with nature. While he inserted in his miniature paintings on tins images of landscapes, or in the medium of an incunabulum on rubbish produced by civilization images of a whale jump, he now adds to his paintings of the desert the depiction of rally cars or of rally-drivers who after an accident are walking towards the nearest service point.
The titles of his paintings only contain an indirect reference to the depicted topography, namely the exact GPS location of Rösel’s position, where he en plein air made the first sketches of the painting later completed in the studio.
At the iconographic level, Rösel destroys any notion of landscape being untouched by humankind as he includes motifs that clearly originate from human civilization. There is no space that has not been marked, used and surveyed.
At the conceptual level, Rösel emphasises his position of radical Constructivism, by simply providing his paintings with the data of his location. His paintings do not claim: This is a picture of what is there. They only claim: This is what I saw.
The fact that nature has been manipulated long before the 14th Century can be supported by the history of the Terni Waterfalls in Umbria, Italy. In 290 BC the consul Curio Dentato ordered to redirect the Velino River into the Rieti valley. A canal was dug and the water of the Velino was directed to the Marmore cliff near Terni, from where it was made to fall down onto the bed of the river Nera below with a jump of 165 metres. This was obviously a demonstration of power by the Romans towards the conquered inhabitants of Umbria as well as the result of some ingenious engineering, yet the Terni Waterfalls were predominantly praised as a marvellous spectacle of nature, amongst others by Lord Byron in the poem Child Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818).
For the last 50 years, the waterfall has been used to generate power. The increasing water shortage has forced its ‘operators’ to open it only at certain times: An exact schedule controls the water supply to the cascades.
Sylvia Henrich’s photographs of the Terni Waterfalls show the scheduled rising and running dry of the so-called spectacle of nature. Her photographs reflect her interest in the interplay of civilisation and nature: Similar to Peter Rösel’s work, they bring out this “structure of dichotomy” which was mentioned initially. Not only do they document the great extent to which these days nature has become the product of manipulation by civilisation, they also focus on the need of wanting to forget exactly this circumstance. And they demonstrate how the power of control of humans over nature and the longing for landscape as the epitome of something untouched by humans are closely related. They reveal how we, while following the ominous command to “subdue“ the earth(Gen 1,28) are constantly forming an image of what the earth would be like if we did not exist. This could not be more evident than in the creation of national parks and the declaration of certain regions as world natural heritage sites by UNESCO.
Contemporary landscape, in my view, consequently shows two characteristics:
Firstly, the factual, irreversible destruction and manipulation of nature by humans. Lisa Crowley’s pictures of the Aral Sea (it belongs partly to Kazakhstan, partly to Uzbekistan) document the condition of what was once the world's fourth largest lake, which practically dried up due to the diversion of the rivers AmuDarya and SyrDarya under Stalin, and which presumably in a few years time will not exist any longer.
The shrinking of the sea has led to the formation of a desert, which after decades of high use of fertilisers and pesticides is severely contaminated. Amongst others, the defoliant Agent Orange was employed, which has become infamous because of its use during the Vietnam War. Approximately 25 % of the region’s inhabitants have mental disabilities with hereditary pathology due to this use. Winds have transported the poison into the stratosphere, and it is traceable today in Greenland, Norway and Mongolia.
Plans to rescue the Aral Sea by glacier melting from the Russian mountains will be implemented in 2011 at the earliest, and should they be carried out, would cost more than 300 billion US dollars. They are just as absurd and short-sighted as Stalin’s projects, even though they are meant to restore an ecological system. But on the one hand it is predictable that they will only cause irrevocable damage to another ecological system, and on the other hand these plans mirror exactly the misconception of total feasibility which has been one of the main reasons for the disaster we are facing now.
Secondly, contemporary landscape is characterised by dependency of perspective: As it is only constructed by the observer, landscape is changing alongside the social, cultural and religious conditions under which it is perceived. The concept of landscape in the 21st Century is different from that of the 16th or 19th Centuries. Today “idyll” is the epitome of the aesthetic palliative, and the “heroic landscape” [8] – in the European 19th Century a movement in landscape painting opposing the hollowness of history painting – completely disavowed by the big-mouthed demeanour of the man from the Obersalzberg, Adolf Hitler, who considered the sublimity of the alpine mountain scenery as the ideal framework for emphasizing his own grandeur.
I am uncertain whether Mount Taranaki holds an answer for us, [9] and I am uncertain whether nature and landscape are suitable for use as instruments, no matter in what sense and for which purpose. There is no mountain, river or forest speaking for us. We should develop some humility to avoid using them for our own interests.
Contemporary landscape is corrupted; we recognise it as worthy of protection and poisoned at the same time. Contemporary landscape, just as landscape has always done, corresponds to us, the observers who are seeking protection and consolation in our loneliness, and who are sick because of the things we do. We are looking for the last refuges where we cannot find a trace of ourselves. All the supposedly positive talk of “holistic thinking” is ignoring that we have been for ever and irreversibly estranged from nature by way of a fundamental dichotomy.
There is no escape from the structure of dichotomy.
Leonhard Emmerling
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