1980, Published by the Arts Council of Great Britain
Introduction - by Peter Wollen
Landscape painting developed relatively late in the history of Western art. Even when, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, landscape painters such as Claude Salvator Rosa (and the now-forgotten Both and Berchem) acquired great renown, their prestige never matched that of figure and history painters. Moreover, they painted exclusively 'ideal landscapes', constructed in the studio and using direct sketches from nature simply as source material to be adapted, composed and improvised upon at will. Their landscapes were invariably given some dramatic or mythological pretext whereby human figures would provide a point of interest. Topographical landscape painting took even longer to develop and was granted very low prestige indeed. Derived from the urban vedutisti tradition, it hardly surfaced at all until the whole attitude to landscape so changed during the nineteenth century.
It is worth remembering that even a 'modernist' critic like Baudelaire, writing in the Salon of 1859, says of Boudin's landscape sketches which he had seen, "He knows quite well that all this will have to be turned into a picture, by means of the poetic impression recalled at will; and he lays no claim to be offering his notes as pictures"1—this after Baudelaire's complaint that "a mind which is absorbed in taking notes has no time to abandon itself to prodigious reveries ..." Nonetheless, he was intrigued that "on the margin of each of these studies, so rapidly and so faithfully sketched from the waves and the clouds (which are of all things the most inconsistent and difficult to grasp, both in form and in colour), he has inscribed the date, the time and the wind: thus for example, 8th October, midday, North-West wind." Indeed, Baudelaire goes on to comment that the accuracy of "these meteorological beauties" could be verified as to season, time and wind.
The introduction of the concept of 'meteorology' into the discourse on landscape was quite novel. The essential physical base for modern meteorology had only been established at the end of the previous century (Lavoisier's discovery of the true nature of atmospheric air in 1783; Dalton's explanation of variations of water vapour in the atmosphere in 1800) and the first great compilation of weather observations was made during the Napoleonic period. Luke Howard's Climate of London came out in 1820, Maury's maps of wind-fields in 1848. Gradually a new scientific basis for the observation of landscape was established, casting doubt on the old poetic and pastoral categories, challenging artists to either assimilate the new mode of observation or hold fast to their prodigious reveries.
This new mode of observation had been prefigured, of course, by Constable. During a lecture given in 1836 constable commented on a painting by Ruysdael he had copied a few years previously: "This picture represents and approaching thaw. The ground is covered with snow, and the trees are still white: but there are two windmills near the centre; the one has sails furled, and it is turned in the position from which the wind blew when the mill left off work; the other has the canvas on the poles, and is turned the other way, which indicates a change in the wind. The clouds are opening in that direction, which appears by the glow in the sky to be the south (the sun's winter habitation in our hemisphere), and this change will produce a thaw before morning. The occurrence of these circumstances shows that Ruysdael understood what he was painting."2
It is in this tradition that Chris Welsby's landscape films must be placed. The invention of photography (near-contemporary of meteorology and soon of course to become an essential instrument of it) and subsequently film offered the artist entirely new opportunities, new ways of integrating scientific observations with poetic impressions. It is worth remembering that 1878, the year in which Muybridge's famous photographs of Leland Stanford's horses were published in the Scientific American, was also the year in which Monet moved to Vétheuil, where he began to paint in series, mooring his boat on the Seine opposite the island of Saint-Martin to record the scene at every hour of the day and each season of the year. He had a slotted box made to hold a number of canvases, changing from one to the next, as the light changes throughout the day (seldom staying on one canvas for more than half an hour). Eventually he reached a point where he would have as many as one hundred canvases under way, of a single subject. Muybridge's analytic photography provided a method of capturing the very sequence of instantaneities which came at the same time to obsess Monet.
It is significant that Muybridge's work was rediscovered by artists in the late 1960s, at the same time that 'land art' was developed.3 In Welsby's work we find Muybridge's analytic serialization of time applied, through the mediation of meteorological investigation, to a revived non-painterly interest in landscape. Through control over the temporal sequence (time-lapse, shutter-speed) of photography and the spatial orientation and movement of the camera and its associated equipment (especially the mount and panning head), Welsby is able to capture through the cinematographic process itself changes in the seasons, the position of the sun, the force of the wind, the movement of the tides; a whole range of natural and meteorological phenomena. Moreover, these phenomena themselves are structured serially: we can envisage the sequence of seasons, for instance, as being a sequence of temporal modules.
In addition, the techniques developed by Welsby made it possible for there to be a direct ('indexical' in the semiotic terminology of Pierce) registration of natural phenomena on film. Thus, camera movement could be determined by wind direction after a windvane was linked to the panning-head on the tripod. Natural processes were no longer simply recorded from outside, as object of observation; they could be made to participate in the scheme of observation itself. The point of observation was no longer the external 'Archimedean' point of the artist's own consciousness. Furthermore, the automatic procedures of science and technology, instead of being inflicted on nature in order to dominate it, were directed by nature itself. The promise at the heart of Welsby's work is that of a new type of relationship between science and nature and between subject and object of observation.
The Romantic cult of nature, which made it possible for landscape painting
to flourish in the nineteenth century more than ever before, grew up
alongside and in reaction against the technological destruction of nature
which accompanied the industrial revolution. The danger, of course, was
that our culture would simply become increasingly split, as art set itself
up against science and science was applied and developed divorced from
any concern over value. Welsby's work makes it possible to envisage a
different kind of relationship between science and art, in which observation
is separated from surveillance and technology from domination. The late
development of landscape art means that its particular history may only
now be really beginning, as it enters a new post-painterly phase.
Peter Wollen
- Charles Baudelaire, 'The Salon of 1858', Art in Paris 1845-1862,
London 1965, pp. 199-200.
- John Constable, Lecture III, 'The Dutch and Flemish Schools', Discourses,
Suffolk Records Society Vol XIV, 1970, p. 64.
- of for instance, Dan Graham, 'Muybridge Moments', Arts Feb. 1967, and Mel Bochner, 'The Serial Attitude', Art Forum Dec. 1967. Jan Dibbets's work is probably most comparable to Welsby's, though Dibbets uses sequential photography more for optical and spacial effect rather than indexical and temporal.
