Landscape painting has died. All that remains are husks, shells of soaring cedar trees that once saw the caress of Emily Carr; naive but strong. We're left with the crumbling cliffs of the group of seven, the eroding Canadian shield, barely represented in its current stage of developed exploitation by soaring brush strokes executed by our ancestral sons of industry. The beauty of Canada is a much more private pleasure now. Art has turned a blind eye to beauty. Art has laced the shoes of context and conflict to the bare, muddy feet of the running rivers of Canada.
You can no longer create a landscape piece. I have no problem with this. The legendary group of seven were rich kids who could afford oil paints, which were quite expensive at the time. If you think it's hard to get your hands on real cobalt blue pigment now, imagine it before the Trans Canada High-way. So this is not a eulogy. This is simply an opinion piece. I believe that the public art domain has removed any form of simple nature appreciation away from the eyes of the viewers. This has happened quite literally in our current time; landscape paintings are bought and sold by a die-hard group of fans, and patronized as wallpaper by hotels and businesses. It's as if there's nothing left to say about nature. It's become a prisoner of cliches.
A major sidestep of the issue is something I came up with when I was thinking of counter-points to my argument. There as a philosopher (epicurius?) who said that positive and negative are all matters of perception. This is obvious, but it does make a good personal mantra when you're cut off driving. It applies to my thesis in this post quite well. All you have to do to appreciate landscape art is treat it abstractly. Focus on the lines, focus on technical skill and composition rather than context and ideas. This is really easy to do with landscape, but it really doesn't get you far in the world we're currently stuck in.
One example is what I deal with the most often: Environmental Art. I capitalize Environmental because currently, it's a proper name for a movement that's been going on since the vague idea of pollution came up. Art that is a picture of a beautiful landscape is now a tool to get people to have shorter showers, and take the bus. Go to a landscape exhibition, and you WILL hear, at least once, "too bad there wont be much left of this to paint pretty soon". Really. Shut up. I don't care, and you don't get it. The world will happily float around after we fuck up the rain-forests. You think we'll run out of beautiful landscapes? Because even one of the worst consequences of desert warming, desertification, creates fantastic spirals and pinnacles of sand and dust. It creates stunning rock formations, it turns urban sprawl into beautiful desolation. Landscapes will always exist. It's the artists that need to adapt.
Leave the message to the curators, I'm tired of not being able to paint Fish Creek Park. I never will, because I personally would rather light myself on fire than paint a landscape, but the point stands.
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2 comments:
how do you think enviromental art could get to the essence of the enviromenal movement betterly? When i say essence, i speak of the revertment back to nature away from the mass technologies that destroy our earth and having human beings with a deeper connection to mother earth. can art be a useful means top achieving these ends? have i generalized enviromentalists too much? the latter might be a question for 'Advocate'.
It is possible that the world will happily float around after we 'fuck up' the rainforests, as long as the masses still have some sort of opiate....
And yes, surely we will find a way to make something beautiful... I think we can see that with the documentary of 'Manufactured Landscapes'. I realize it's not painting but the photographer/filmaker has found a way to depict these images in a way that could either be interpreted as beautiful or horrible... again it comes back to perception.
And as far as the what environmentalists are, we need to include all forms of agents in the environmental movement because part of the way we affect norms is through culture and art in general plays a big part there. We can't simply have better environmental laws and regulations, people need to internalize different norms in a way that makes them perceive and interact with environment differently.. art has a huge part to play here in getting people to think critically.. or at least just to think.
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