Elizabeth Magill THE LIE OF THE LAND
Mitchell concedes that landscape's very exhaustion, and its consequently enhanced power at the levels of mass culture and kitsch, may now signal "a potential for [its] renewal in other forms, other places" . His essay's main concern, however, is to unmask the ideological operations of the language of landscape painting in the age preceding the dawn of modernism. To follow the trajectory of this genre into the twentieth-century, Mitchell implies, usually involves subscribing to one of two contrasting versions of the story of its natural conclusion. The first, which construes the rise of the genre as an attempt by painting to free itself from more properly literary concerns, leads on to that further refinement of the medium of painting that culminates in "pure" abstraction. The second, which emphasises landscape painting's supposed gradual abandoning of convention in favour of an increased naturalism, tends, on the contrary, ultimately toward "pure" hyperrepresentation. Though Mitchell does not follow the latter trail to its end, an obvious elaboration of this narrative involves its diversion into photography, commonly perceived as posing a serious challenge to painting as, among other things, the ideal means by which to produce "natural representations of nature" . Landscape's twin termini in modernism would therefore appear to be abstract painting and photography or photorealism. What possibilities, we might ask, does Mitchell's account of its rise and fall leave for landscape painting in a postmodern age? Charles Harrison addresses this question in the closing essay of Landscape and Power, enlisting a work by Art & Language as a signpost indicating a possible way out of a perceived impasse. Hostage XIX (1989) is a painting which depicts the interior of an imaginary museum. It is sealed behind a sheet of glass onto which a text is pasted which declares an intention - the intention to paint a landscape - in the following terms: We aim to be amateurs, to act in the unsecular forbidden margins. We shall make a painting in 1995 and call it Hostage; A Roadsign Near the Overthorpe Turn. The work will be executed in oil on canvas. It will measure 60 cm. x 40 cm. The white roadsign will occupy about half the picture. It tells us we are 7 miles from Brackley, 2 from Overthorpe and 2 from Warkworth. These names will be scarcely visible in a tangle of lines. The professional may cast a colonising eye, but the tangle will go to a corporeal convulsion beyond her power. The painting will be homely and priggish. We may hide behind our speech at this appalling moment. The landscape this text specifies, according to Harrison, is one that cannot be painted. Or, at least, "it is a landscape that cannot be painted and meant". It cannot be meant seriously, that is, by someone who still subscribes to the hegemonic protocols of an institutionalized modernism which consigns landscape to the margins rather than the centre, the local rather than the international, the amateurish rather than the professional, the inept rather than the accomplished. The only hope lies in the dismantling of such protocols, thereby allowing for the possibility that the landscape proposed by the text "might indeed one day be painted...by someone blind to the interdictions of the modern." All of which suggests that in 1989, at a time when postmodernism (in either its critical or ironizing modalities) was hardly in its infancy, Art & Language, at least, affected to defer this possibility, this "appalling moment", to some point in the (admittedly, then not too distant) future.
A painting by Casper David Friedrich is not a thing of the past. What is past is only the set of circumstances that allowed it to be painted: specific ideologies, for example. Beyond that, if it is any 'good', it concerns us - transcending ideology - as art we consider worth the trouble of defending (perceiving, showing, making). It is therefore quite possible to paint like Casper David Friedrich 'today'. It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of Richter's example in opening up a space in which a contemporary painter like Elizabeth Magill can work, while at the same time indicating certain boundaries against which such work must test itself. Of particular relevance, especially in the context of the account of landscape painting outlined earlier, is Richter's redeployment of both abstraction and photographic realism in a polymorphous and radically "impure" practice, one of the key strains in which has been the painting of landscapes. So let us bracket the problematic remarks on ideology and transcendence in the passage quoted in order to highlight Richter's teasing first and last sentences, before turning to a consideration of the paintings of Elizabeth Magill. A quarter of a century after Richter's unlikely profession of faith Magill's most recent paintings present us with evidence of the simultaneous possibility and impossibility of "painting like Casper David Friedrich 'today'" (using the proper name of Friedrich to signify more generally the tradition of "Northern Romantic Painting" of which he is an exemplary exponent. ) In 'Scenic Route #3' (1997) three spindly, contorted trees rise up from a gently undulating, low-lying hummock to dominate the left half of the painting. Silhouetted against a sickly ground, rendered in toxic washes of green, in which a hazy mountainous backdrop disappears into a turbulent sky, they loom awkwardly over a small group of figures, also depicted in silhouette, who occupy the bottom left-hand corner of the picture. At first glance, all the necessary ingredients for the perfect Romantic landscape would appear to be in place. The stage is set for an awe-inspiring encounter with the sublime, as Man confronts Nature in all its overwhelming incommensurability. Yet somehow something is missing and it never quite happens. It never quite comes together. Far from paying due homage to the grandeur of the surroundings which dwarf them, the group of figures are variously absorbed and distracted. Only the figure on the far left is staring up at the trees, camera in hand, ready to capture their image in a snapshot. Two of the remaining group of three figures have their backs turned on their companion and face out of the picture frame. They appear to be engrossed in their own interaction with the fourth figure, a child, who looks up at them. All appear to be oblivious of the few stray birds that fly overhead, improbably spotlit in a luminous white. Like a stage-set destined forever to await the ideal conjunction of players, director and audience that would bring it gloriously to life, this encounter with the sublime is simultaneously signalled and deferred, advertised and postponed. 'View 5' (1998) is based on a similar set-up. It depicts a lone man at dusk, artfully framed by an overhanging branch trailing into the top right of the painting and a clump of brightly flowered foliage poking up from the bottom left. He appears to be standing on a scrubby expanse of flower-pocked grass, warily contemplating a large, ominous wedge of black-grey paint which intrudes from the top left-hand side of the frame and threatens to engulf the entire painting. The viewer's consistently frustrated attempt to read this ambiguous area of darkness as either an unfathomable gulf or an impenetrable mass tends ultimately to undermine the painting's rudimentary illusionism, allowing us to read it simply as a dark wedge of paint. The liberal sprinkling of yellow and orange dabs, denoting tiny flowers, which lie stubbornly on the surface of the picture plane also signify anti-illusionistically. They do in a manner similar to the startlingly white birds already noted in 'Scenic Route 3' and the tiny rhinestones embedded in the painted surface of a number of other, related paintings, such as 'Area 1' (1998) and 'Lake View' (1998). Both 'Scenic Route 3' and 'View 5' strain visibly under the pressure exerted on them by contrary forces operating at various levels: those of abstraction and figuration (at a basic level of generic form), chance and design (at the level of painterly execution), and the disparity of provenance between different compositional elements (at the level of source imagery). In this recent body of work Magill mixes a heady brew in terms of both form and content. The mix contains formal echoes of a whole catalogue of picture-making strategies: from the silhouettes favoured by the Victorian leisured classes, through the technique of collage associated with Cubism and the early challenge and incorporation of photography into "high" art, to the post-war apotheosis of "pure" abstraction (Magill's freely applied underlying washes of paint) and the contemporaneous assault on the integrity of the picture plane (her encrusted rhinestones and distressed surfaces). The particular achievement of these pictures is to posit the space of painting as an arena for the play of powerfully contradictory and centrifugal impulses which are momentarily held in tension in a series of paintings that displays, against all odds, a sense of consistency and integrity, however precarious and imperilled. In her earlier work this drama of disintegration was rehearsed in very different ways: either in a bewildering rollercoaster ride, from painting to painting, through an everchanging panorama of styles and content, or in a measured series of gambits that produced groups of works in which the temporal was consistently pitted against the spatial, with a tendency to privilege the latter. As instances of this second tactic we may note first an early solo show in 1989-90 which included a number of works based on the ordered proliferation or repetition of a single motif, e.g. '918 Stars' (1989). A subsequent series of paintings in 1992, entitled 'Belongings', was based on time-stamped x-ray images of luggage fed through an airport security scanner, e.g. '14:18:39' (1992). A year later, yet another group of paintings featured the lyrics of popular songs in a painterly format that suggested a series of freeze-framed karaoke printouts, e.g. 'Middle of the Road' (1993). In each of these series the temporal modes of repetition, scansion, and recitation, respectively invaded the more properly spatial mode of picturemaking, significantly compromising its integrity. This infection of the pictorial by "literature" reflected the "linguistic turn" in the visual arts which has for several decades been symtomatic of the crisis in modernism, with its loss of faith inter alia in the twin myths of purity and progress. In her subsequent turn toward the landscape Magill has rediscovered a time-honoured, but recently neglected genre which has greatly facilitated her search for what she refers to alternately as a sense of "distance" or "space". She glosses these terms respectively as "a distance that gives you space to think" (where the colloquial "you" appears to refer equally to the painter and the viewer) and "a space that seems boundless" (where the verb "seems" suggests the necessarily tentative, negotiated, even illusory nature of such aspirations for painting in the age of postmodernism) . Magill's formal inventiveness reflects a magpie nature which is also evident in the range and variety of her image-hoard: the extensive archive of found material and self-snapped photographs on which she has continually drawn throughout her work. In 'Scenic Route 3', for example, the group of figures is derived from a photograph she took of a family of tourists on a trip to Paris. The trees in the same painting are from a shot of the countryside in her native County Antrim, in Northern Ireland. The lone figure in 'View 5' was photographed in the streets of London, where Magill has lived and worked for over a decade. The palimpsestic nature of compositions such as these bring us inevitably to the question of "place" in Magill's painting. This must be distinguished from the "space" they have opened up and now occupy in contemporary practice, and which we have just discussed. ("Space", in this sense, is largely, though not exclusively, a matter of form; whereas "place" is primarily a matter of content.) Magill is by no means unique in being an artist brought up in a rural background in one country who has chosen to make a home in the urban capital of another. In considering the landscapes of a decidedly London-based painter one should be wary of overstressing the geographical accident of her growing up in a small coastal town on a tourist trail that takes in some of Ireland's most spectacular scenery and culminates in the celebrated natural phenomenon of the stacked basalt pillars of the Giant's Causeway. Nevertheless, for a painter who spent her formative years in Ireland to set about reviving the vocabulary of Romantic landscape painting, in however subversive a fashion, is to offer certain hostages to exegetic fortune. To do so, moreover, as Magill has done, as a seemingly natural progression from a previous exploration of the popular mythology of the American western, is to beg some interesting questions. "We have no prairies/ to slice a big sun at evening". The opening lines of Seamus Heaney's poem 'Boglands' refer explicitly to certain parallels and contrasts between the myth of the west in Irish and American culture. In 1996-7, in a series of paintings grouped under the general rubric 'Way Out West', Magill provided Irish art with an ersatz prairie and peopled it with mysterious, shadowy horsemen who appear to have ridden in straight from Hollywood central casting. In retrospect it is possible to view this series as the crucial forerunner of Magill's current paintings, as the distressed landscapes through which these heroic loners gloomily travel on their nameless quests shade gradually into terrain more oddly familiar to an Irish viewer. (A key transitional work is a small painting, 'Untitled 3' (1996), from the 'Way Out West' series which uncannily resembles a bruised and battered Paul Henry, Ireland's most popularly celebrated painter of the western landscape). To invoke the category of 'Irish art' in relation to Magill of course calls for an important caveat. As we have noted, her entire oeuvre has been produced within the specific milieu of London. Her access to American popular culture surely differs little from that of her metropolitan peers, regardless of disparate backgrounds. Nevertheless, as Luke Gibbons has argued, while "the invocation of the west as the source of heroism, mystery and romance goes back at least to antiquity and is found in many different cultures....[in] modern times Ireland and the United States would seem to be the outstanding examples of countries in which the myth of the west has been elevated to the status of a national ideal." While County Antrim is geographically located in the north-east of Ireland, the much-vaunted beauty of its glens and coastline allow for its easy assimiliation into a generalised image of the romantic Irish landscape which is intrinsically associated with the western seaboard. Magill's response to both versions of this enduring myth could be described as an attitude of tempered or critical romanticism. Her invocations of the myth of the west may be melancholic, but they are never nostalgic. The west is no simple land of heroes and romantics, a locus of beauty and truth. It is equally a land of misfits and fantasists, of sundry disfigurations and fabrications. In the essay referred to earlier W.J.T. Mitchell touches on the topic of nostalgia: Like imperialism itself, landscape is an object of nostalgia in a postcolonial and postmodern era, reflecting a time when metropolitan cultures could imagine their destiny in an unbounded "prospect" of endless appropriation and conquest. No such nostalgia for a prelapsarian past is entertained in Elizabeth Magill's fractured, hybrid landscapes. Emanating from the heart of a metropolitan culture, and the hand of a native of one of its former colonies, these paintings are, in every sense of the phrase, constitutionally dislocated. As such they reflect an increasingly common characterization of this age of accelerated globalization which bases itself, as James Clifford puts it, on "a view of human location as constituted by displacement as much as by stasis". These paintings defy a reductively nativist reading in terms of an exclusive set of origins or antecedents. But they also resist the premature (not to say, politically naive) embracing of what Caren Kaplan has referred to as "the emancipatory metaphor of nomadism". Kaplan is not alone in expressing serious reservations concerning those champions of postmodernism who in their search "for alternatives to purely nationalist or modernist critical strategies have embraced enthusiastically the generalised figure of the nomad as a symbol of hybridity, mobility and flux." To replace the romance of rootedness with the fantasy of rootlessness can hardly be called progress. The art of Elizabeth Magill is nothing if not equivocal. It stages a quest for "boundlessness" in a medium (painting), and an idiom (neo-romantic landscape) manifestly beset by compromise and constraint. The degree of necessary, strategic (self-)delusion involved in the aspirations articulated by these works is dramatised in the paintings themselves, at the complementary levels of form and content. The resultant tension accounts in great measure for their atmosphere of profound melancholy. Magill's compelling contribution to the expansion of the resources of contemporary painting arrives in the wake of modernism and in the shadows of a variety of nationalisms. (It is no mere coincidence that her work has never fitted comfortably into exhibitions exploring "the Irishness of Irish art" or, more recently, those celebrating the triumphal advent of "young British art".) It remains to be seen where these works of extraordinary, morbid beauty will lead; what promise remains hidden in their gloomy fissures and forbidding depths. For they gesture as clearly toward what they exclude or occlude as what they might feasibly (re)present. They speak of impossibilities as well as possibilities, of routes which are no longer viable as well as of untold and uncertain prospects. |
