Landscape Looking Back
Jörg Heiser
It’s good to have some time, maybe a month or so, to think things through properly before sitting down and writing an essay about an artist's work. I was lucky enough to spend some of that time in Sicily. I mused about a simple question: what does it mean for perception when landscape is depicted in black and white, with not even shades of grey in-between? All around me blood oranges were ripe and almond trees were blooming, and so that question seemed oddly out of place. The closest I would get to black and white (apart from the pages of The Herald Tribune and my copy of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein) seemed to be a plate of Pasta Nero with Parmesan sprinkled over it.
But then the full-on experience was closer than I would have thought. We had waited for a clear day to drive up to Mount Etna, up to the point at ca. 6000 feet above sea level where the street abruptly stops, blocked by a thick mantle of lava from the last major eruption of November 2001. The morning sky had been immaculately blue, but the higher we got on the serpentine road, travelling from late spring to early spring to winter, from palm trees to pine trees to snow, the more the mountain top became enwrapped in a thick, blanket of cotton clouds. Arriving at our destination, my wife, Sarah, our son, three-month old Helio (peacefully asleep), and I were not the first, of course there were souvenir stands, couples in matching Gore-Tex gear, coach loads of sprightly pensioners, and Italian ladies equipped with video-cams and Gucci stilettos, bravely defying the frost. But it took just a glance to the side to be on another planet: a huge heap of nothing but sooty, powdery lava steeply rose up for about 500 feet to form the even cone of a crater, created by that last great eruption from 18 months earlier. It would have been a bad idea to climb that crater carrying a three month old, so we stayed close to the road, strolled around a bit, marvelled at the hot steam rising from clefts in the ground and bought a pot of chestnut honey.
Driving back down, it took less than 20 minutes to be surrounded again by a sea of green, punctuated with oranges, lemons and almond blossom. The sun came out and we paused to picnic. Silently munching on cheese and olives, we looked back up from where we had just come, Etna's clouded top. Gulping, it dawned on us that we had just been, for the first time ever, in a completely black and white landscape. Except for the paint marks of tourism, there had been just black lava, white snow, and a white sky of clouds.
Back home, we couldn’t, we couldn't resist telling friends that we had taken our baby up to Etna, to the rim of the volcano, leaving them with gaping mouths at our irresponsible freakishness. But of course it hadn't been dangerous at all - driving on asphalt in fact had made it feel ridiculously close to a theme park ride. What had been weirdly uncanny, though, was the drive down, the instant plunge back into Sicily’s voluptuous spring: we had felt like Dorothy, thrown from the violent storms of Arkansas into the a Disney-like world of gnomes and talking scarecrows: famously, The Wizard of Oz, right at this point in the story, switches from black-and-white to technicolor.
Those two radically different, yet dialectically connected, experiences of landscape are culturally coded as the ‘cold’ encounter with the sublime and the ‘hot' encounter with the beautiful. I realise now that in Paul Morrison's paintings and murals, they are collapsed into one. Like monochromatic facsimiles or photograms, trees and leaves, bushes and petals are devoid of all colour and shades. The convention of the picturesque perspective - a detail of flora or a protagonist in the foreground against a wide open vista to create depth of space - ceases to work as well without all detail but the silhouette (and maybe a few radically simplified traces of wood grain in the style of Carl Barks Duckburg, or Richard Artschwager's furniture objects), dandelions and trees are suddenly like paper cut-outs superimposed on a two-dimensional picture plane.
Fences (the only obvious trace of man in Morrison's world), sometimes ironically arranged into grids blocking the view and spiders’ webs (the only trace of fauna) create a mock, pop-up perspective. Landscape is broken down into pictograms arranged on a screen, oscillating between endless depth and the sheer absence of depth. The time stretch of a 20 minute drive. creating an experience already odds with that of a hikers half a day climbs, is finally suspended, ironed flat like Daffy Duck run over by a steamroller.
But again: what does it mean for perception when landscape is depicted in black and white? Obviously Paul Morrison's work draws on a visual language that was first introduced in cartoon culture: the reduction of iconic characters and objects to clear lines and even fields of black and white. Some of these conventions came from artistic decision, but most were simply due to the constrictions of cost-efficient newspaper printing. Yet in his seminal book Understanding Comics (Kitchen Sink Press, Northampton/MA, 1993) Scott McCloud has a few more ideas about what iconic abstraction in black and white actually means. Why are we happy to identify with a few dots and lines?
When two people interact, each of them maintains a self cognition that is usually much sketchier and idealising than the cognition of the person they encounter. In brief, you could say each of them perceives his - or herself in a kind of ‘iconic abstraction’, while perceiving the respective other in full realistic detail. Many comic artists have used that split to create reader identification, or what is called the ‘mask effect': the characters are iconic and abstracted, while the backgrounds they traverse ate rendered in much more realistic detail - think of Herges Tin Tin for example. "This combination allows readers to mask themselves in a character and safely enter a sensually stimulating world." as McCloud puts it (ibid p. 43). In other words, realism tends to objectify, while iconic abstraction tends to subjectify what is depicted. In Japanese comics, as McCloud points out, the main characters are often designed simply, to encourage reader identification, while other characters are drawn more realistically in order to objectify them. "emphasising their otherness from the reader” (ibid p.44).
Now what happens if a landscape, rather than a character, is depicted in the style of iconic abstraction, with no protagonists in sight but us, the beholders? When landscape is objectified through romantic, picturesque depiction, this triggers sentimentality: we mourn the split between us and ‘it', the loss of imminent involvement with the natural environment, and yet at the same time we see nature as a beautiful mirror of the soul, representing our longing. But if landscape in turn is subjectified it turns uncanny. We start to fear what we otherwise miss: imminent involvement in terms of landscape as a living entity entangling us, turning us into the threatened object. As long as it is painting or mural, we are eagerly ‘re-objectifing' the iconically abstracted landscape as we see it in its material presence and as an art piece displayed in a gallery space. But suppose one was accidentally locked in that space for the night, with all electricity turned off, and with just passing car headlights (or, even better, lightning) occasionally illuminating the black and white images for brief glimpses: the horror would be hard to play down.
For Morrison's DVD piece. cambium (2002), the gallery lights are in fact turned off for the projection of black and white images accompanied by a looped soundtrack of gentle rain shot through with thunder. Cambium is the botanical term for the cellular plant tissue, and thus suggests the reassuringly slow passage of time measured in months and years - a notion put into sharp contrast with the film's swift succession of short sequences. We see drive-by shots of dark forests; stills of wilted sunflowers like silhouettes of exhausted wanderers; trees standing out like black teeth against a white sky, mirrored in a lake; a romantic road curves into the fog; an animation of a single leaf swimming down a river, with water-grass like a dead body’s long hair flowing under the surface; the spurred head of a dandelion sparkling like a chandelier; trees and bushes bent by the wind, as if an invisible giant was breaking through the undergrowth; cartoon leaves blown by the autumn breeze; the close up of a single leaf, before the camera tilts up slightly to move along the ground like a predator on the track; and then cambium’s loop starts anew with black fir trees and thunder.
Watching cambium, with Paul Morrison’s painterly work in mind, I somehow immediately had to think of the one feature film made by Charles Laughton - otherwise know as the great Dickensian character actor in films like Billy Wilders Witness for the Prosecution (1958). In his 1955 film, The Night of the Hunter, Robert Mitchum plays Harry, a deranged serial killer dressing and talking like a venerable preacher, making himself believe he is fulfilling the Lord’s order by wiping out evil widows and taking their money. John and Pearl are two little kids on the run after Harry has murdered their mother and has realised that $10,000 are hidden in Pearl’s cuddle doll. They take a boat and escape, Harry chasing them on horseback. While they float down the river, with the water glittering gently in the moonlight, in the foreground, nature itself seems on display in fairy-tale abstraction: a spider’s web, a frog and two little rabbits, unaware of the owl that might slaughter them at any moment.
The film, and especially the dream chase, is shot in a consciously woodcut way, with a stripped-down, intense ‘cartoon’ quality: like Harry’s knuckles are tattooed with ‘Love’ and ‘Hate’, the scenes are stylised in sharp contrasts of black and white; trees and houses are like black paper cut-outs on a shadow-play stage. While Harry chases the kids, he slowly sings “Leaning… leaning on the everlasting arm”; as it turns out, Harry has simplified the lyrics from what was originally: ‘Leaning on Jesus, leaning on the everlasting arm.” And thus, in The Night of the Hunter, the simplifying omission - abstraction itself - turns good into evil, beauty into horror.
Iconic abstraction sharply delineates the almost traumatic rift between sensual appearance and meaning, between form and its concept. The act of cognition is the act of closing this rift - an act of closure. With landscape painting reduced to black and white iconic form, it is only in our mind that comes alive. In fictional narratives, purposeful omissions create suspense, forcing us to commit closure and imagine what is not shown (the most famous example is perhaps Hitchcock's shower-scene in the 1960s film Psycho). Like The Night of the Hunter, cambium combines these two types of closure, making us wonder not only about what the black might hide and the white might outshine, but also about what happens in-between the cuts. The piece is a succession of scenes taken from feature films, some are horror film live-action. some Disney-type cartoon. While the latter trigger feelings of Bambi-like innocence threatened by fairy-tale evil, the former already eclipse any idea of nature's sweetness in the first place. But in terms of the aforementioned ‘mask effect', both types of sequences equally tend to reverse viewer identification: iconic abstractions of nature are subjectified, ie they take the leading role, rather than any protagonists. The last sequence, taken from Sam Raimi's gory horror film The Evil Dead (1982) is a particularly good example: the camera quickly tracks the forest ground as if we shared the viewpoint of nature's hungry soul itself. It's as if perspective itself was bewitched. Maybe this is the most apt and uncanny description of what Paul Morrison alludes to when he describes the genre he has carved out for himself as 'cognitive landscape: landscape looking back.
Landscape Looking Back
Jörg Heiser
It’s good to have some time, maybe a month or so, to think things through properly before sitting down and writing an essay about an artist's work. I was lucky enough to spend some of that time in Sicily. I mused about a simple question: what does it mean for perception when landscape is depicted in black and white, with not even shades of grey in-between? All around me blood oranges were ripe and almond trees were blooming, and so that question seemed oddly out of place. The closest I would get to black and white (apart from the pages of The Herald Tribune and my copy of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein) seemed to be a plate of Pasta Nero with Parmesan sprinkled over it.
But then the full-on experience was closer than I would have thought. We had waited for a clear day to drive up to Mount Etna, up to the point at ca. 6000 feet above sea level where the street abruptly stops, blocked by a thick mantle of lava from the last major eruption of November 2001. The morning sky had been immaculately blue, but the higher we got on the serpentine road, travelling from late spring to early spring to winter, from palm trees to pine trees to snow, the more the mountain top became enwrapped in a thick, blanket of cotton clouds. Arriving at our destination, my wife, Sarah, our son, three-month old Helio (peacefully asleep), and I were not the first, of course there were souvenir stands, couples in matching Gore-Tex gear, coach loads of sprightly pensioners, and Italian ladies equipped with video-cams and Gucci stilettos, bravely defying the frost. But it took just a glance to the side to be on another planet: a huge heap of nothing but sooty, powdery lava steeply rose up for about 500 feet to form the even cone of a crater, created by that last great eruption from 18 months earlier. It would have been a bad idea to climb that crater carrying a three month old, so we stayed close to the road, strolled around a bit, marvelled at the hot steam rising from clefts in the ground and bought a pot of chestnut honey.
Driving back down, it took less than 20 minutes to be surrounded again by a sea of green, punctuated with oranges, lemons and almond blossom. The sun came out and we paused to picnic. Silently munching on cheese and olives, we looked back up from where we had just come, Etna's clouded top. Gulping, it dawned on us that we had just been, for the first time ever, in a completely black and white landscape. Except for the paint marks of tourism, there had been just black lava, white snow, and a white sky of clouds.
Back home, we couldn’t, we couldn't resist telling friends that we had taken our baby up to Etna, to the rim of the volcano, leaving them with gaping mouths at our irresponsible freakishness. But of course it hadn't been dangerous at all - driving on asphalt in fact had made it feel ridiculously close to a theme park ride. What had been weirdly uncanny, though, was the drive down, the instant plunge back into Sicily’s voluptuous spring: we had felt like Dorothy, thrown from the violent storms of Arkansas into the a Disney-like world of gnomes and talking scarecrows: famously, The Wizard of Oz, right at this point in the story, switches from black-and-white to technicolor.
Those two radically different, yet dialectically connected, experiences of landscape are culturally coded as the ‘cold’ encounter with the sublime and the ‘hot' encounter with the beautiful. I realise now that in Paul Morrison's paintings and murals, they are collapsed into one. Like monochromatic facsimiles or photograms, trees and leaves, bushes and petals are devoid of all colour and shades. The convention of the picturesque perspective - a detail of flora or a protagonist in the foreground against a wide open vista to create depth of space - ceases to work as well without all detail but the silhouette (and maybe a few radically simplified traces of wood grain in the style of Carl Barks Duckburg, or Richard Artschwager's furniture objects), dandelions and trees are suddenly like paper cut-outs superimposed on a two-dimensional picture plane.
Fences (the only obvious trace of man in Morrison's world), sometimes ironically arranged into grids blocking the view and spiders’ webs (the only trace of fauna) create a mock, pop-up perspective. Landscape is broken down into pictograms arranged on a screen, oscillating between endless depth and the sheer absence of depth. The time stretch of a 20 minute drive. creating an experience already odds with that of a hikers half a day climbs, is finally suspended, ironed flat like Daffy Duck run over by a steamroller.
But again: what does it mean for perception when landscape is depicted in black and white? Obviously Paul Morrison's work draws on a visual language that was first introduced in cartoon culture: the reduction of iconic characters and objects to clear lines and even fields of black and white. Some of these conventions came from artistic decision, but most were simply due to the constrictions of cost-efficient newspaper printing. Yet in his seminal book Understanding Comics (Kitchen Sink Press, Northampton/MA, 1993) Scott McCloud has a few more ideas about what iconic abstraction in black and white actually means. Why are we happy to identify with a few dots and lines?
When two people interact, each of them maintains a self cognition that is usually much sketchier and idealising than the cognition of the person they encounter. In brief, you could say each of them perceives his - or herself in a kind of ‘iconic abstraction’, while perceiving the respective other in full realistic detail. Many comic artists have used that split to create reader identification, or what is called the ‘mask effect': the characters are iconic and abstracted, while the backgrounds they traverse ate rendered in much more realistic detail - think of Herges Tin Tin for example. "This combination allows readers to mask themselves in a character and safely enter a sensually stimulating world." as McCloud puts it (ibid p. 43). In other words, realism tends to objectify, while iconic abstraction tends to subjectify what is depicted. In Japanese comics, as McCloud points out, the main characters are often designed simply, to encourage reader identification, while other characters are drawn more realistically in order to objectify them. "emphasising their otherness from the reader” (ibid p.44).
Now what happens if a landscape, rather than a character, is depicted in the style of iconic abstraction, with no protagonists in sight but us, the beholders? When landscape is objectified through romantic, picturesque depiction, this triggers sentimentality: we mourn the split between us and ‘it', the loss of imminent involvement with the natural environment, and yet at the same time we see nature as a beautiful mirror of the soul, representing our longing. But if landscape in turn is subjectified it turns uncanny. We start to fear what we otherwise miss: imminent involvement in terms of landscape as a living entity entangling us, turning us into the threatened object. As long as it is painting or mural, we are eagerly ‘re-objectifing' the iconically abstracted landscape as we see it in its material presence and as an art piece displayed in a gallery space. But suppose one was accidentally locked in that space for the night, with all electricity turned off, and with just passing car headlights (or, even better, lightning) occasionally illuminating the black and white images for brief glimpses: the horror would be hard to play down.
For Morrison's DVD piece. cambium (2002), the gallery lights are in fact turned off for the projection of black and white images accompanied by a looped soundtrack of gentle rain shot through with thunder. Cambium is the botanical term for the cellular plant tissue, and thus suggests the reassuringly slow passage of time measured in months and years - a notion put into sharp contrast with the film's swift succession of short sequences. We see drive-by shots of dark forests; stills of wilted sunflowers like silhouettes of exhausted wanderers; trees standing out like black teeth against a white sky, mirrored in a lake; a romantic road curves into the fog; an animation of a single leaf swimming down a river, with water-grass like a dead body’s long hair flowing under the surface; the spurred head of a dandelion sparkling like a chandelier; trees and bushes bent by the wind, as if an invisible giant was breaking through the undergrowth; cartoon leaves blown by the autumn breeze; the close up of a single leaf, before the camera tilts up slightly to move along the ground like a predator on the track; and then cambium’s loop starts anew with black fir trees and thunder.
Watching cambium, with Paul Morrison’s painterly work in mind, I somehow immediately had to think of the one feature film made by Charles Laughton - otherwise know as the great Dickensian character actor in films like Billy Wilders Witness for the Prosecution (1958). In his 1955 film, The Night of the Hunter, Robert Mitchum plays Harry, a deranged serial killer dressing and talking like a venerable preacher, making himself believe he is fulfilling the Lord’s order by wiping out evil widows and taking their money. John and Pearl are two little kids on the run after Harry has murdered their mother and has realised that $10,000 are hidden in Pearl’s cuddle doll. They take a boat and escape, Harry chasing them on horseback. While they float down the river, with the water glittering gently in the moonlight, in the foreground, nature itself seems on display in fairy-tale abstraction: a spider’s web, a frog and two little rabbits, unaware of the owl that might slaughter them at any moment.
The film, and especially the dream chase, is shot in a consciously woodcut way, with a stripped-down, intense ‘cartoon’ quality: like Harry’s knuckles are tattooed with ‘Love’ and ‘Hate’, the scenes are stylised in sharp contrasts of black and white; trees and houses are like black paper cut-outs on a shadow-play stage. While Harry chases the kids, he slowly sings “Leaning… leaning on the everlasting arm”; as it turns out, Harry has simplified the lyrics from what was originally: ‘Leaning on Jesus, leaning on the everlasting arm.” And thus, in The Night of the Hunter, the simplifying omission - abstraction itself - turns good into evil, beauty into horror.
Iconic abstraction sharply delineates the almost traumatic rift between sensual appearance and meaning, between form and its concept. The act of cognition is the act of closing this rift - an act of closure. With landscape painting reduced to black and white iconic form, it is only in our mind that comes alive. In fictional narratives, purposeful omissions create suspense, forcing us to commit closure and imagine what is not shown (the most famous example is perhaps Hitchcock's shower-scene in the 1960s film Psycho). Like The Night of the Hunter, cambium combines these two types of closure, making us wonder not only about what the black might hide and the white might outshine, but also about what happens in-between the cuts. The piece is a succession of scenes taken from feature films, some are horror film live-action. some Disney-type cartoon. While the latter trigger feelings of Bambi-like innocence threatened by fairy-tale evil, the former already eclipse any idea of nature's sweetness in the first place. But in terms of the aforementioned ‘mask effect', both types of sequences equally tend to reverse viewer identification: iconic abstractions of nature are subjectified, ie they take the leading role, rather than any protagonists. The last sequence, taken from Sam Raimi's gory horror film The Evil Dead (1982) is a particularly good example: the camera quickly tracks the forest ground as if we shared the viewpoint of nature's hungry soul itself. It's as if perspective itself was bewitched. Maybe this is the most apt and uncanny description of what Paul Morrison alludes to when he describes the genre he has carved out for himself as 'cognitive landscape: landscape looking back.