Essay
Windows
to the World: From Landscape Painting to Instagram
I
Landscape paintings were once a significant feature of the
domestic interior. What is it about the interior—the antithesis of landscape—that
creates a corresponding impulse to escape, to be out in the world? Over the last century, landscape painting has
fallen out of fashion, but images of landscapes still proliferate in the
interiors of our homes as well as our phones and desktop screensavers. How does the contradiction between the interior
and landscape’s view onto the world play itself out in our domestic settings,
workplaces and virtual spaces?
Alberti's Treatise on
Painting (1435) suggests that constructing a painting is akin to
defining a window onto the world.
According to Alberti, painting becomes a way of translating a spatial
experience of the outside world into an illusion of space using perspective.[1]
Alberti's use of the window as a metaphor for this process also implies that
painting is not so much an immersive experience, but one that is already
integrated into a domesticating system of architecture. Through these windows, the viewpoint is
singular, space is contained, and the frame imposes rectilinear limits on our
vision. The windowbecomes the structure
that directs the view, producing the spectator.
In Alberti's time, painting was the significant image-producing
technology. Today we are bombarded with
so many image-producing platforms, but the metaphor of the window as our
positional relationship to the images we consume of the outside world persists.
Television promised to be a window to the world bringing moving images from
afar into families’ living rooms.[2] This initial iteration of screen-as-window
was a harbinger for future developments in computers. Tellingly, in 1985,
Microsoft renamed its graphical operating system from “Interface Manager” to
Windows. With it, the concept of interaction between user and computing
environment was replaced with an image of transparency, suggesting the
construction of a new virtual architecture into which a new kind of viewer is
ensconced.
When we engage with image-producing technologies, we are
accustomed to understanding them as windows that provide a view onto that which
is not physically before us. To what
degree do these windows actually provide the view out onto the world that we
are promised and to what degree do these windows become part of an insulating
structure, like a wall, that relegates us to a perpetual interior?
Rene Magritte, The Human Condition, 1933
As far as landscape is concerned, the view out through painting’s
windows shifts according to the West's changing relationship to nature. In the Renaissance, renderings of landscape
often imply a fear and mistrust of landscape; nature was seen as the godless
domain, a place of danger, demons and the unknown. In the 19th
century, as the wilderness contracted and the problems of urbanism grew,
landscape became a central fascination for Romantic painters. In nature, they saw a spirited place that
mirrored their psychological anxieties about mortality and struggle, propelling
their quest for the sublime. Something of this romantic relationship to
landscape endures through Gauguin, Van Gogh and the Expressionists, but in
Cezanne’s paintings, the landscape image is radically unmoored from pathos and
allegorical function.
Despite the site-specific titling of his works, Cezanne’s
landscapes are not fundamentally concerned with depicting a sense of place, rather they define a space for painterly invention and
exploration of space and form. It is clear that Cezanne is strongly situated in
his provincial hometown of Aix, but his familiarity with this landscape allows
him to leave it for the formal world of painting: color, mark, space. Thus, Cezanne
signals the beginning of modernist painting, and the march toward
abstraction. Even for early American
Modernists like Arthur Dove and Georgia O’Keefe, who saw their painterly
engaging with nature as a spiritual endeavor, the power of the landscape is
practically ceded to a language that will leave the landscape behind: abstract
painting.
By the mid 20th century, landscape painting was
largely a regional, peripheral practice while the rarefied language of
abstraction grew to become the dominant language for paintings in the modern,
and later the corporate, interior. With this development, the window flattened
and painting’s illusionistic horizons were traded for a matter-of-fact position
in the here-and-now. Now painting is the
wall, not the window. It becomes a place
for invention, suggestion, and affect—its language teasing at a myriad of
possible associations—while refusing to be specifically located.
Paul Cezanne, The Garden at Les Lauves, 1906
II
In the contemporary context, landscape painting is largely
relegated to the domain of kitsch interiors in the placeless architectures of
hotels, restaurants, and waiting rooms.
In these spaces, their occurrence on walls nearly suggests a
placeholder, as if to signal that a painting belongs there on the wall, but the paintings lack
perspectival, painterly or theoretical depth—and so they simply perform the
task of holding a wall to keep the interior from feeling blank. These
landscapes become iterations of an all-too familiar picturesque setting that
has no relationship to any real sense of place.
Their suggestion of scenery—think of the painting of beach chairs in a
hotel—is trying to pry us from the very clear idea that we are in an anonymous
space that desperately lacks any sense of place. These landscapes cannot
convince us of being a window to some other place, but perhaps might just
distract us long enough to forget how fully we have become subjects of these
placeless architectures. Conversely,
high-end hotels and restaurants—which cultivate a sense of being exclusive
places—employ abstract painting, as a way of reiterating the designed interior
as the destination in itself.
Though landscape painting may have suffered its defeats in the
past century, images of places—most notably on our phone-cameras—have
proliferated faster than ever. In her
ground-breaking text, On Photography
(1973), Susan Sontag brilliantly problematizes photography’s popularization
in the 1970’s. With regard to travel
and tourism, she sees tourists from powerful countries (United States, Germany,
Japan) dispensed around the world collecting photographs as a way to stay
productive—she estimates that they cannot stop working—while re-affirming their
acquisitive, consumerist relationship to the world.[3] The image of the tourist-choked site, a far
more international phenomenon now than it was in Sontag’s time, endures now
awash with the glow of tiny screens and absent-minded crowds re-making the same
pictures that have been made on that site over and over again. The local, that thing that the tourists have
arguably come to witness, is transformed into a spectacle whose reach extends
deeper and deeper into the life patterns of the city as the image of the city
comes to dominate over the experience of it.
We witness a doubling down on popular conceptions of the
picturesque through platforms like Facebook and Instagram, where places are depicted
and tagged as escapes, significant returns, and dream-images. Amid the digital clutter
of recent technological advances in contemporary popular photography—higher
resolution, patina effects, panoramic possibilities—there emerged a ubiquitous
but strangely brutish invention: the selfie-stick. Ridiculously low-tech and
awkward for the sleek digital age, these extended appendages survive because
they accommodate our desire to see ourselves immersed in a sense of place. The
selfie-stick extends the witnessing, existential character of the selfie image
to include something beyond the isolated subject confronting itself. The perspective-broadening appendage enables
an embeddedness in landscape, a distancing from the camera’s eye to include a
sense of positioning, and with it, a notion of place. When watching tourists
photograph themselves, it’s easy to simply see a horde mentality at work, or
the kind of acquisitive relationship to place that Susan Sontag describes, but
there is also perhaps a more generous reading of the phenomenon as it relates
to our drive to situate ourselves. Place and the notion of being situated
matter more than ever today, in an era characterized by global displacements
and the disorienting regime of virtual space.
Pictures loom large in memory; so much so that we sometimes even
confuse what we remember with the pictures that we have seen. Among our ever-expanding personal
photographic archives, there are the landscapes: places we have lived and
visited, places we have had significant experiences and realizations. Though depictions of the outside world, these
images contribute to the interior of our selves: our memories, subjectivity,
even our sense of identity. Perhaps it
is because of the significant role that landscape and place play in forging a
sense of who we are, that we can’t stop picturing ourselves wherever we
go.
Our
experiences of place are often predetermined by the pictures that will be made
of the experience. Just watch a tourist
take a picture and review its results without looking at the actual, physical
landscape being backgrounded. Indeed, as
we move through experience, we also bring the window along with us as a
conceptual structure. We follow the
cues of those around us—whether physically present or on our social media
feeds—and produce image-worthy experiences.
Despite the force of this predetermination, on rare occasions, our
landscape photographs do manage to provide a vital personal view. Perhaps by
accident, because of some concurrent experience in place, or due to the
mechanics of memory, pictures of places can take on actual significance for our
experience of being-in-the-world. At what junctures does the contemporary
picturesque disintegrate into a personal experience of place? When does a site
become a significant setting for thought, for memory, for experience?
III
George Shaw, Scenes from the Passion, First day of the
Year, 2003
I am drawn to the work of the English painter George Shaw, who has
been painting the landscapes around the housing estates where he grew up for
the better part of two decades. When he
is written about, it is often in reference to his depiction of working-class
England as well as his use of Humbrol paints—designed not for fine art, but for
hobbyists painting model figurines and trains.
I find this line of commentary somewhat patronizing. It is what contributes to the mischaracterization
of his work as sentimental, situating the work in a long tradition in Western
painting of making poverty picturesque. Conversely, the power of his work lies
in how the photographic-based paintings reveal wondrous possibilities for
looking around, despite the bleakness.
He finds modernist order in the structure of closed shops, landscapes
that suggest Corot but strewn with debris and pornographic magazines, and a
haunting sensibility concerning places that are popularly deemed indecent and
gritty. The work is not overtly clever
in its art historical associations, rather, it’s the result of the artist’s own
enchantment with both place and painting as an adolescent. He continues to paint all these places where
his life happened, and the photographic-derived paintings take on the air of
memory. As viewers we get to walk around
in the landscape of his memory. This
could suggest that the paintings allow a kind of class voyeurism, but what I
see at work is something quietly revolutionary, Shaw as a employing a
Situationist strategy as in Vaneigem’s Revolution
of Everyday Life, in which the act of being attentive to the quotidian
aspects of experience are a way of undermining systemic power.[4]
George Shaw, The Back that Used to be the Front, 2008
The paintings maintain a clear connection to the
conventions of photographic seeing, but they possess a different, almost
stiller, atmosphere. Amid this hushed
atmosphere, there are suggestions of the religious, as in the titling of a
major series of his work: Scenes from the
Passion. The paintings posses an aura in the Benjaminian sense, and yet
this is complicated by their sourcing from photographic images.
In his essay, Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction (1933), Walter Benjamin addressed the distinction
between modern, reproducible art forms like photography and singular works of
art like paintings. He attributes a
fundamental difference in that the singular work (the original) possesses an aura that is lost through reproduction (the copy).[5] Benjamin's idea of aura—a kind of authenticity that is
bound to subjectivity, spirituality, and ritual and native to pre-industrial
art forms—is interesting in thinking about in the photographic aspects of
Shaw’s work. In the most reductive
terms, Shaw’s paintings are hand-made copies of photographs, and yet, the
images are so steeped in an atmosphere of the personal that they resonate in
terms akin to aura.
Benjamin is somewhat ambivalent about discarding
the subjective aura of the work of art in favor of the universal and
revolutionary possibilities of the reproducible. He wrote this seminal Marxist text as a call
to embrace the ideological machinations of new imaging technologies, and yet he
seems quite taken by the idea of the aura, despite its abject characterization
as a ritualistic remnant of commodity culture. This is a fundamental tension in
Benjamin, between the necessity of revolutionary objectivity and his apparent enthrallment
with issues of subjectivity. An avid reader of both Proust and Marx, his
writing in the Arcades Project teeters
between a fascination with the workings of memory as a subjective matter, and
the possibilities for a collective revolutionary action.[6]
Benjamin sought a redemptive space where dreams
might become collective, where class-consciousness could awaken the masses in
the manner that Proust’s memory is spurred by the smell of a Madeleine. Perhaps Shaw’s work embodies something of
this tension—picking up on Benjamin’s image of the flaneur—the detached, itinerant observer of modern life—but the
artist’s eye is not bourgeois and disinterested the way the flaneur is, but
rather is that of a revolutionary insider picking up on the detritus of commodity
capitalism as it manifests in the places the artist knows. Shaw’s paintings are neither simply personal
nor sentimental as they are often mistaken to be; they picture a vernacular of
a place, inscribed with the violence of class, sexuality, and boredom, that
comes into focus in a deeply personal way.
IV
In a time when our personal digital archives are
likely to number in the tens of thousands of images, the possibility that
singular images might still resonate attests to a peculiar relationship between
memory and the photographic. Benjamin was interested in mass-reproduction of
singular images, but today we face a parallel situation in which the
inexhaustible production of singular images—predominantly though our phones and
social networking platforms—lose their distinction due to their proliferation,
not their reproduction. The reproducible
image has lost its significance—and likely its revolutionary potential—while
the endless stream of similar, but distinct images—are causing a phenomenon of
image fatigue that stands on the threshold of blindness.
Is there something to be gained by countering
the proliferation of images by bringing the singular image into focus? How might such a process slow down our
processing and allow something akin to aura take hold? Perhaps this brings us
back, full circle, to the ritualistic role of images in restoring a sense of
location, of being-in-the world. Perhaps
this is precisely the ironic turn: that the phenomena connected to individual
subjectivity that Benjamin struggled to dispense with are now a revolutionary prerequisite
for situating ourselves so that we might begin to fix our gaze through the
torrent of the spectacle. Today our
subjectivity is severely compromised by the same social networking technologies
that promise a platform for pronouncing them.
The window that defines our vision has broadened and multiplied, but
perhaps it is also becoming redundant and repetitive, as it entices and
distracts the wandering eye that finds no place to rest, to fix a gaze, to come
into being.
[1]
Alberti, Leon Battista. On Painting.
[First appeared 1435-36] Translated with
Introduction and Notes by John R. Spencer. New Haven:
Yale University
Press. 1970
[2]
Charles I. Coombs. Window on the World. The Story of Television
Production. New York:The World Publishing Company. 1965
[3]
Sontag, Susan. On Photography, New
York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 1973.
[4]
Vaneigem, Raoul. The Revolution of
Everyday Life. London: Practical Paradise, 1972
[5]
Benjamin, Walter, The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction,1936 in Walter
Benjamin: Selected Writings Vol. 3 ed. Eiland, Howard and Jennings,
Michael, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2006
[6]
Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project,
ed. Eiland, Howard and McLaughlin, Kevin. London: Belknap Press, 1999