Iceberg in Mist

Between 1968 and 1970 Gerhard Richter painted a remarkable range of 'damaged landscapes', as they are termed by Mark Godfrey, the curator of Tate Modern's Gerhard Richter: Panorama. These include aerial views of cities in thick grey paint, the colour of ash and rubble, that Richter later likened to images of the destruction of Dresden but which might equally be seen as warnings of some future apocalypse.  One of these, Townscape Paris (1968), is a painting I referred to rather tentatively in one of my very first blog posts here.  At the same time Richter was also painting a very different kind of townscape, reproducing details of architectural models, and these too seem dystopian - windowless blocks showing no sign of life, casting shadows over empty white roads that resemble the patterns on a circuit board.
 

Another monochrome aerial view from 1968, Clouds, provides glimpses of an abtsracted version of the German countryside - imagery that Godfrey compares to the opening sequence (above) of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935). Two years later Richter began a very different series of cloud paintings, this time treating them as isolated objects, white against featureless blue-green skies.  They resemble Alfred Stieglitz's famous cloud photographs, Equivalents (1927), which in turn (as Rosalind Krauss points out in that weighty tome Art Since 1900) could be viewed as Duchampian readymades - uncomposed and detached from their environment.  Alps II (1968) might be a close-up of a storm cloud and is barely recognisable as a landscape painting, certainly a long way from the heroic image of German mountains celebrated in those early Reifenstahl films.

Seascape (Sea-Sea) (1970) is described in the exhibition as a 'collage of two photographs of the sea, one inverted to appear as the sky. The painting creates a momentary illusion of a coherent seascape, until it becomes clear that the ‘clouds’ in the upper half of the painting are waves. It creates a sense of discontinuity and suggests Richter’s acknowledgement of the gulf separating him from the moment of Romanticism.' It made me think of Rothko's grey paintings, with the patterns of waves replacing Rothko's brushtrokes.  Mark Godfrey views them as a cross between Capar David Friedrich and Blinky Palermo: an attempt at the kind of radical abstract statement Palermo was making in his Cloth Paintings using the traditional medium of a seascape.  Another point of comparison is Vija Celmins and, like her, Richter also produced images of black and white fields of stars.

In 1971 an exhibition of Richter's recent work, painted in flat colour rather than black and white, prompted various critics to compare him with Friedrich.  Landscape near Hubbelrath (1969), for example, shows an empty view with a road sign where we expect to see, in Friedrich, a church spire.  Richter said that his art lacked the spiritual underpinnings of Romanticism: 'for us, everything is empty'.  However, Mark Godfrey argues that Richter and Friedrich both aimed to create a sense of unfulfilled desire (readers of this blog may recall an earlier post on the way Friedrich composed 'obstructed views').  This approach may have seemed particularly appropriate to a post-war German artist working at a time when the purpose of painting itself was being called into question.

There is one more interesting example of Richter's engagement with Friedrich later in the exhibition, a painting called Iceberg in Mist (1982).  I have mentioned various artists here before who went north to paint the Arctic seas -  Peder Balke, Lawren Harris, Per Kirkeby - and Richter made his own trip in 1972, looking for a motif as powerful as Friedrich's The Sea of Ice.   Mark Godfrey mentions that on his return Richter made 'an extraordinary and little-known book of black and white photographs of icebergs', printed, like the two halves of Seascape (Sea-Sea), both upside down and right side up.  In this way Richter rejected the single sublime image and arranged the photographs in such a way that 'their overt subject became more or less irrelevant.'  Richter's urge to thwart our desire for spectacular landscapes is also evident in the later painting, where we cannot even glimpse the tip of the iceberg as the whole view is shrouded in mist.

Caspar David Friedrich, The Sea of Ice, 1823-4

Beyond Twelve Nautical Miles

Two photographs in magazines I’ve been reading this month caught my eye.  The first, from Tate etc. (Summer 2011) is Magritte’s Les Idées Claires (1955), an image chosen by Jeff Koons (who likens the boulder floating over the sea to one of his basketballs in water).  The second, from The Wire (May 2011) is Herbert Distel’s Projekt Canaris (1970), showing a three metre long polyester egg which the artist launched from the coast of West Africa.  A similar piece is referred to in David Clarke’s recent book Water and Art – in Beyond Twelve Nautical Miles (2000) Zhan Wang set one of his stainless steel rocks adrift at sea near Lingshan Island.   And I have written here before about David Nash’s Wooden Boulder, which began as a sculpture in the landscape but after describing the course of a river ended up as another of these art boulders, set free on the sea.  As far as I know the current location of Wooden Boulder remains a mystery.  Distel’s egg  was driven by trade winds across the Atlantic and reached Trinidad seven months later.

I wonder why there hasn’t been more ‘sea art’, floating equivalents to the famous land art projects of the American West?  Tacita Dean may have had trouble ‘Trying to Find Spiral Jetty’ (1997) but tracking down a sculpture in an ocean could have been even more interesting.  Herbert Distel sought help from the Cuban authorities in locating his egg after it sailed beyond the Canary Islands and was thought to be heading into the Caribbean.  It was eventually spotted by the captain of a Dutch ship who sent a telegram: ‘Egg seen on 6 December 1970 gmt 17.50, about 100 km east off the island of Trinidad.’ Of course I’m not really advocating that we litter the sea with permanent floating art works.  Instead sea artists might take inspiration from Buster Simpson, who has an ongoing project to drop disks of limestone into the Hudson River: rocks that will gradually dissolve and counteract the effects of acid rain.

Rough Seas

The Tate's Susan Hiller exhibition begins with Dedicated to the Unknown Artists (1972-76) an installation first shown at the Gardner Centre, Sussex University, when she was artist in residence there (I wonder if I saw it there at the time as I was being taken to one of the pantomimes they used to put on for children).  Rachel Withers has described it well: 'several hundred vintage and contemporary "rough sea" postcards: visually seductive views purporting to show gigantic waves bombarding British beaches, piers, and esplanades. The piece marshals these in grid formation, systematically logging details of the cards' locations, captions, and message content ("We had a storm today, just like this one," and so on), and evidencing generations of British natives themselves colluding in the anthropological myth of the "British love affair with lousy weather" ... Its postcard images reiterate the ideologically saturated motif of the Sublime--reason's battle with cosmic chaos. In parallel, the work's King Canute-like "empirical" sorting system threatens to be swamped by the morass of material it strives to tame and contain.'

Fred C. Palmer of Tower Studio, Herne Bay - postcard, 1913

Source: Wikimedia Commons

According to Brian Dillon in Tate Etc. 'something of the same semantic exchange between image, text and unseen history circulates in The J. Street Project (2002–2005): a film, photographic series and wall display which record the 303 thoroughfares (streets, alleyways, modest paths) in Germany that are still named for the Jewish communities that once resided, worked or traded there. “Still named” is not exactly the phrase here, of course, because what Hiller has archived is a series of places that lost their names in the Nazi era and have since had them reinstated ... As Hiller’s film demonstrates, contemporary life carries on around these traumatic inscriptions as though they were not there: the memorial name becomes just another textual element (ignored by passers-by) in the street furniture of the modern city, so that it is entirely unclear if it functions as a means of recall or amnesia.' I sat and watched the film for a while and noticed the way that she classified and ordered the material, just as she had earlier devised a typology of rough sea imagery, except that the sequencing here seemed to be based more on the people passing the camera than the specifics of the view.  The section I saw edited together footage of streets being entered by children, giving way to further scenes with old people - the places might have been interchangeable, but in each case the street signs were visible reminders of the contrast between past and present.

The final room of the Susan Hiller exhibition includes Voyage on a Rough Sea: Homage to Marcel Broodthaers from last year - the latest of various various works that have returned to the theme of rough seas.  She says she actually met Broodthaers in 1972 at a London exhibition: 'in the pub afterwards I shyly mentioned that I was working with postcards of rough seas, and he told me something about his own postcard projects'.   Broodthaers was himself concerned with classification and curation - that year in Düsseldorf he organised a display of eagles 'From the Oligocene to the Present', mixing together valuable sculptures with worthless modern objects like product labels and old champagne bottle corks.  His film A Voyage on the North Sea (1974) (below) is often cited as a key work in the history of conceptual art and is explicitly referred to in Hiller's montage of re-coloured postcard images.  His work has also inspired Tacita Dean (whose approach often resembles Susan Hiller's) and she paid tribute to him in Section Cinema (Homage to Marcel Broodthaers) (2002).  Dean also made two of her large blackboard drawings derived from Broodthaers' film Chère petite soeur (1972), which was itself based on a found postcard from 1901, depicting a boat in a rough sea. Broodthaers used the postcard's message as subtitles, leaving  the viewer to wonder (as in Hiller's rough sea installation) why people choose to send these particular postcard images... 'Dear little sister, this is to give you an idea of the storm which we had yesterday.  I'll give you more details about it, best wishes and see you soon, Marie.'