Constable's realism, Part 2 of 2
John Haber
revealed only to mankind. This elevates the inner imagination, as for
Milton in his blindness, but the imagination is seen as passive,
taking the imprint of God and nature.
In Romanticism, there are two poles of experience, nature and the
imagination -- and what places them together as bearers of truth in
opposition to doctrine is that both are seen as active powers. In the
preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth states that he's "a man
speaking to men" (I'll return to the dated inclusiveness of the word
"man"), and that he wants to describe nature as it is, but with "a
certain coloring of the imagination." When the imagination is simply
taking an imprint, it is deadened, no matter how immersed it is in
nature.
In his famous sonnet, "The world is too much with us." The world
isn't gone exactly, paradoxically, for us to be out of touch; it's in
surfeit and we lay "waste" to ourselves. We see nature, and we know
the lea is "pleasant," but little in it is "ours." What can make it
ours isn't God, for he'd rather be a pagan, or myth, for the latter is
"a creed outworn." To recover nature for the poet means humanizing it
- finding something in it other than the "getting and spending," a
criticism that could almost be out of Marx (another great Romantic).
The idea is nicely put in "Tintern Abbey":
... For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity.
That can take the immensity of a single experience, like Wordsworth's
view of Mount Snowdon in "The Prelude." -- or the Romantic painter's
encounter with the sublime. When Turner talks of being lashed to the
mast of a ship during a storm, he simultaneously announces his daring
to be true to nature, his own boldness, and his escape from nature
into myth -- the myth of Ulysses bound to the mast at once to hear and
to escape the sirens' call.
In the Constable, the changes precisely humanize nature in the face of
its vastness, even while looking back toward the dated tradition of
proper fine art as something polished enough to be at a first remove
from nature. As detail is firmed up, the most obvious change is a
greater sense of scale. The tree in the foreground no longer
overwhelms the cathedral; the contasting shadows that emerge on the
open field create a perspective line through the cows. (Don't forget
that the subject of the painting is the furthest point in it.)
An easily overlooked detail is added as well, tiny people parading in
front of the cathedral way. (Can one think of a Turner without people
implied in it?) They humanize the subject, by associating it with
human culture and ordinary human traffic. Salisbury cathedral becomes
not nature in isolation, but a work of architecture and a center of
rural life. The people also make the building look bigger, that sense
of scale again. Indeed, to my eye they look way too small: they in
effect exaggerate the sublime.
They also exaggerate the transient. Just as people come and go, so do
Constable's greatest achievement in his art, the clouds, which get
much more emphasis in the final work. I once wrote that he paints
them like portraits of dear departed friends.
In these works, the painter is of course male, and nature is still
colored by the female. Wordsworth in his sonnet would rather be
"suckled" by paganism; Constable's natural perspective is set by cows.
With the following generation, this and many other things will change,
as the labor of men becomes a value within nature and not just a
fearful aspect of modern life. So we get Courbet's stonebreakers.
What will change is the optimism implied in the creative imagination.
Our separation from nature becomes a permanent given; every perception
we have is colored by the inner world. Photography replaces the
variable, human pair of eyes with a single lens, the metaphorical
equivalent of the single inner eye. Modernism announces its terrors.
And the play with realism persists in many ways as one last, tormented
protest.
John
Erik A. Mattila
I find myself wanting a little more historical context. This probably
isn't a fault of your writing -- perhaps a sign of its strength. So it
made me want to crack out the history books and familiarize myself with a
few things. Dates, and I was realling wanting to compare the time of
painting with the time of industrialization. Philosophy -- I wanted to
compare these dates also. What kind of ideas were being haggled about in
the cigar smoke of gentlemen's clubs at the time. I found myself putting
these things together as conjecture based on reading you essay.
Personally, I've always wanted to make a study of landscape painting --
not with the books so much, but actually copying landscapes with paint.
I am especially fond of the landscapes that were painted before landscape
developed as a genre in its own right. I find Polluoiolo's [sp? just
call him 'The Chicken Vendor] landscapes fascinating. Of course they
were imaginary, but also they were influenced by vision, as was Giotto's,
DaVinci's etc. But the idealism invested into these was very innocent, I
think, in that there was no compulsion at all to make the hills of Padua
look like the hills of Padua, as it was more or less a non-issue at the
time. So the landscape was another element that would frame and showcase
the painting's subject, which of course was dominately human (in contrast
to the 'sublime' you are referencing).
Where I live, the desert resembles Polluiolos's landscape remarkably
(Hercules and Antaeus). The dominant plants, the Mesquite and Creosote
shrub, grows and survives by sending out a very large array of roots in
orde to claim an adaquate share of the meagre moisture, and expells a
hormone into the soil which prevents other seedling from getting a hold
of life withing this proprietary zone. This results in a remarkably
regular distribution of shrubs which form a very apparent pattern. You
can see this same pattern in Polluiolo's landscapes. I've always
wondered if there is, in fact, a biome in Italy where the plants do the
same thing, or if this was entirely the artist's invention of a mythical
landscape.
But when landscape painting per se came to be in the Low Countires and
Germany there was something going on which I see as a cause. It all
comes together, in my view, as a corollary of the ideology of the Wild
Man that was so popular at the time. In some sense the Wild Man
represented nature, or more properly the idealization of nature. But
more, it offered an alternative in the popular imagination to the
contemporary stresses of society, which were very great. Politically,
the Holy Roman Emporer's hand reached deeper into the rural areas due to
the extraordinary expense of keeping the Ottoman's in check. The
Reformation was underway, with all it's brutality. The Peasant's war,
which was based on the desire to return to the good old days -- notibly
the pre-Roman land tenure of the Mark, which provided everyone with
land. Not to mention frequent famine (weak infrastructure) and plagues.
We could go on and on, of course, as this was a very complex period,
historically. But the point here is that the people resurrected the Wild
Man myth as a model of an alternative which could be contrasted to the
woes and pitfalls of daily life. Sort of a 'good old days' mentality,
which we still do, as a matter of fact.
Heyden White's "Forms of Wildness" (in "Tropics of Discourse") is a 'must
read' for anyone interested in the "Wild Man" ideology. I don't think
you can understand European art of this period without dealing with this
subject.
This was going to be a short response, but your essay stimulated my
imagination. I'll leave it right here, since I have another deadline
right now to meet. I'll try to get back to it. What's I've said above
is just the antecendent to the period you are talking about. The thesis
is that "Nature" becomes an important ideological element in the
discourse of the period, and I guess I'm trying to ferret out the
similarity and differences in the use of nature in the British, American,
and German 'sublime' which occurred much later and under somewhat
different social and intellectual circumstances.
Again, excellent work, John. I appreciate it. Also, I know that Alison
is interested in getting back in the sublime.
A parting thought. I thought Barnett Newman's 'zips' functioned like the
little people you mentioned in Turner and Constable - in a very abstract
way, of course. What do you think? (I think N opposed this idea last
year).
Best,
Erik
Alison A Raimes
<emat...@tomatoweb.com> writes
>Again, excellent work, John. I appreciate it. Also, I know that Alison
>is interested in getting back in the sublime.
Damn right ! Last week I watched how John writes - he approaches it in
the same way that an artist attacks a canvas, with the same passion and
the same sense of pride. Its one of the many things in John that I
identified as essential to his existence. There was absolutely no
stopping him ! One of the shower of the many generous gifts bestowed on
me by John was _Turner and the Sublime_ by J. Wilton - probably the best
essay on the sublime ever written. There is enough fuel to keep us
rolling for months in that one.
>
>A parting thought. I thought Barnett Newman's 'zips' functioned like the
>little people you mentioned in Turner and Constable - in a very abstract
>way, of course. What do you think? (I think N opposed this idea last
>year).
That's what Newman wanted them to do. I may also question that.
Alison A Raimes
http://www.raimes.demon.co.uk
John Haber
like big people, but you may be on to something. My favorites really
are from earlier eras and later ones, too -- for me the Renaissance or
Ruysdael, then Monet. I have danced around the years in between,
unless they're good old Americans like Church, but I'd been thinking
about Wordsworth for a while, Alison was talking about the sublime,
and then I felt I'd better get some notes down in case I have to do a
review for the Frick.
I wanted to approach it as evolution of ideas, mixed with examining a
painting -- hence the dragging in of poetry and gender. But I'd like
to get into other kinds of cultural and economic history around this
sometime, too. A feminist could argue that the connection of recourse
away from social pressures to the creative imagination, with the
latter connected to male imagination's active engagement with female
nature, suggests that the period's exclusion of women from various
roles connects deeply to its emotional breakdown and the city's social
pressures. The New Historicism would take that further in the context
of period documents. What are the implications of coming to London
from the landed gentry encountering the "getting and spending" or for
the landed gentry of watching the average people touring the cathedral
town?
M.
A lot depends on what you mean by "nature" - the natural world,
the natural pristine wilderness, physical reality, a romantic concept?
I think more of Constable's idealism than realism, as natural surroundings
were being devastated during his lifetime, the oak forests were cut down, the
great satanic mills were being built. There was no real wilderness, as all
land was
sliced up into cities, towns, farms and vast estates. He painted a
disappearing way of life, just as many landscape (& wildlife) painters are
doing today.
Marilyn
Erik A. Mattila
all. At any rate, put youself in his shoes. Here you have this large
painting that is a color field, and you want it to say 'big' in order to
qualify as The Sublime. If it's just the color field, there's a real scale
problem. One workaround would be contrasting it with something small,
exactly as Church and Turner would have done. Newman may have failed
altogether, of course, since there's a big difference between establishing
scale with a human figure and a thin vertical line. I think I would have to
stare at some Newmans for a while to see if he pulled it off.
Erik
Alison A Raimes wrote:
> In article <380F7CB6...@tomatoweb.com>, Erik A. Mattila
> <emat...@tomatoweb.com> writes
>
> >Again, excellent work, John. I appreciate it. Also, I know that Alison
> >is interested in getting back in the sublime.
>
> Damn right ! Last week I watched how John writes - he approaches it in
> the same way that an artist attacks a canvas, with the same passion and
> the same sense of pride. Its one of the many things in John that I
> identified as essential to his existence. There was absolutely no
> stopping him ! One of the shower of the many generous gifts bestowed on
> me by John was _Turner and the Sublime_ by J. Wilton - probably the best
> essay on the sublime ever written. There is enough fuel to keep us
> rolling for months in that one.
> >
> >A parting thought. I thought Barnett Newman's 'zips' functioned like the
> >little people you mentioned in Turner and Constable - in a very abstract
> >way, of course. What do you think? (I think N opposed this idea last
> >year).
>
John Haber
>A lot depends on what you mean by "nature" -- the natural world,
>the natural pristine wilderness, physical reality, a romantic concept?
Perhaps I wasn't being clear enough. My goal was precisely to
eludicate what it would have meant to Constable and his generation,
and my point was that defenses of realism in this newsgroup haven't
thought about how many things it can mean.
>I think more of Constable's idealism than realism, as natural surroundings
>were being devastated during his lifetime, the oak forests were cut down,
>the great satanic mills were being built.
The historical background is a good point. But am I crazy, or didn't
I already rant on about the new economic order, industrial society,
and so on?
John Haber
>For that matter, you could question whether Newman painted The Sublime at
>all.
There's a reach to grandeur, but I'd have to agree that he and his
pers would have been uncomfortable with the Romantic sublime. A major
pont of this art is its this-worldliness and its human scale.
The zips thus function a little like the drips in a Pollock: they
announce the painting's material fact, including its scale, thus
refusing either to be larger than life or dwarfed by nature; they
suggest motion, as in the verbs "drip" and "zip," suggesting a painter
at work, rather than confronting nature as a foreign substance; and
they suggest metaphorically a place for the viewer within the work,
whether in the space between drips or an anonymous, reasonably
life-size human ("vir" in the title). When Newman creates a painting
called Cathedral (his best, I think) or Rothko creates a chapel that
is small and dark, it's like undermining the sublime, soaring gothic
of Salisbury after all, in a new-found intimacy.
Interestingly, whereas nature has a feminine side in Romantic
doctrine, which gender criticism can pick apart, gender criticism has
been rough on the '50s for the opposite reason -- its grounding the
painting in a painter's male ego. The drips and zips have been seen
that way too -- semen, an erection, "vir heroicus sublimus" (man the
sublime hero). In reviewing Pollock and Rothko, I tried to salvage
them for the forces of good, so to speak. Having a huge show al over
the country this year by Lee Krasner (and a big new gallery space for
her dealer in New York, Robert Miller, this fall) will help, too. But
sometimes Newman does remind me that these guys had a bit of an ego
problem !
Alison A Raimes
<jha...@haberarts.com> writes
>But am I crazy, or didn't
>I already rant on about the new economic order, industrial society,
>and so on?
Yes, you are crazy and yes, you did rant on ... now did you do up your
flies this morning or are you still wandering the streets of New York
ever hopeful of a free blow job ?
--
Alison
Alison A Raimes
<emat...@tomatoweb.com> writes
>For that matter, you could question whether Newman painted The Sublime at
>painting that is a color field, and you want it to say 'big' in order to
>qualify as The Sublime. If it's just the color field, there's a real scale
>problem. One workaround would be contrasting it with something small,
>exactly as Church and Turner would have done. Newman may have failed
>altogether, of course, since there's a big difference between establishing
>scale with a human figure and a thin vertical line. I think I would have to
>stare at some Newmans for a while to see if he pulled it off.
>
>Erik
Well you guys jumped ahead here before I could place a few more ideas in
front of you. Lets see if I can drag you back a few steps.
The idea of the *Sublime* has changed from culture to culture and from
age to age. *Big* was never the idea of the *Sublime* ... certainly not
in Kantian terms from which we tend to draw our interpretation of the
word (as per Burke's original use of it). We understand it to mean the
overwhelming feeling of awe when confronted with the space between man
and nature - the feeling of helplessness in a random universe even. This
feeling has nothing to do with *big* but as you so rightly point out,
more to do with scale. John made some astute remarks regarding this.
The question: How can this experience ever be made into a material
object like a painting ?
Newman's idea was to give up the notion of an external world. He wanted
to find a way of relating the metaphysical event that happens when two
people first meet - when their personalities initially make contact. The
space between them before the familiarisation occurs. The idea of the
*zip*, which he insists was an intended as streak of light, was to give
*life* to the atmospheric background - to create a totality and not to
divide (as most people like to interpret it). He liked to refer to
artists as "choreographers of space" and paintings as a "dance of
elements". In other words his work was trying to bring together human
experience as one total experience.
I am unable to relate this to the idea of the Sublime. On the one hand
Newman wants to give up the notion of an external world and then he
wants to make it into a recognisable experience ... like a dance.
For me, the idea is that these are two separate experiences - human
experience being based on our related learning experiences - that every
emotion we experience is part of a previous experience. The Sublime
experience is a celebration of the knowledge that there is something
beyond our experiences as humans. Its beyond our grasp. Its a feeling
that we cannot interpret into words or images and its also an acceptance
that it is beyond us. Why must the human being insist on conquering such
feelings ? Would it not be better for the artist to recognise the two as
separate experiences ? To relate to it as the *other*.
How can Newman justify it as a *oneness* ?
--
John Haber
>Yes, you are crazy and yes, you did rant on ... now did you do up your
>flies this morning or are you still wandering the streets of New York
>ever hopeful of a free blow job ?
One can always hope.
I found where I did write about Constable at the Frick before, in
honor of a show of his sketches downstairs. One can see that my views
have changed somewhat, but I wrote better then:
http://www.haberarts.com/constabl.htm
It includes a reproduction of the Frick's "White Horse."
Alison A Raimes
<jha...@haberarts.com> writes
>Alison :
>>Yes, you are crazy and yes, you did rant on ... now did you do up your
>>flies this morning or are you still wandering the streets of New York
>>ever hopeful of a free blow job ?
>
>One can always hope.
I never did find out if Camus actually said something about hope being a
measure of our despair ... the Camus list experts said I imagined it, so
until I know better I adopt it as my own reply.
John: Hope is a measure of our despair.... or five hundred bucks would
help.
Alison ;-)
Erik A. Mattila
John. After all, in the discourse of The Sublime 'nature' was described as
feminine because being moved my nature was considered unmanly by the
Sprezzatura of the day. These guys thought that if you were 'ravished' by
nature, it had to be a feminine experience -- who is the 'ravishee' and
'ravisher?' Today, I think the inclination would be to describe the
'feminine' not so much as something that is 'unmanly.' Is that the
understatment of the year?
Here's an interesting aside. Several years ago I was listening to a
broadcast on NPR about Ragtime. The scholar who was being interviewed was
extremely interesting. While Scot Joplin has all the spotlight, he pointed
out that most Ragtime composition were written by women. And not
professional musicians either, but housewives who's hobby was piano. At the
time playing the piano was considered very unmanly - subsequently most pop
piano music was written by women. He also mentioned that the publishing
industry of the day would simply steal these compositions, and ascribe
authorship to some of the leading performers of the day, like Joplin. He
claimed that some of Joplin's most popular recordings were authored by a lady
in Ohio that history has completely forgotten.
Erik
John Haber wrote:
> Erik:
> >For that matter, you could question whether Newman painted The Sublime at
> >all.
>
Alison A Raimes
Newman. Going to wait until you get back from your trip next week before
ploughing into it but there is something you wrote that hits the nail
right on the head.
In article <38105e7...@news.columbia.edu>, John Haber
<jha...@haberarts.com> writes
>John
>
>John
>jha...@haberarts.com
>http://www.haberarts.com/
--
Alison
John Haber
> After all, in the discourse of The Sublime 'nature' was described as
>feminine because being moved my nature was considered unmanly by the
>Sprezzatura of the day. These guys thought that if you were 'ravished' by
>nature, it had to be a feminine experience -- who is the 'ravishee' and
>'ravisher?'
That still runs through the Abstract Expressionist sublime, no
question, especially given the hype back then about Jung and the
anima. The other of the unconscious is feminine, like the other of
nature before it. I'm going to post later some longer thoughts on
this I wrote while I was traveling.
>Today, I think the inclination would be to describe the
>'feminine' not so much as something that is 'unmanly.' Is that the
>understatment of the year?
Well, we can hope! I'm going to argue that while the gender-specific
unconscious is sexist, at least we were making progress by making it a
part of anyone. In other words, as inevitably happens, one's ideas
allow you to break out of the prejudices of the time, even though the
terms of the debate you use still leave you part of them.
Michael Leja's book on the period, which I was reading on the plane
home, notes that the Jungian dogma around back then also encouraged
them to think in terms of a synthesis of opposites. Actually, I found
his book so much in synch with what I was thinking about in arguing
back with you guys -- and had written in my hotel room the day before
-- that it was spooky. I want to argue back with him anyhow, but I'm
scared I'm going to be plagiarizing something I hadn't even read yet.
There may not be a collective unconscious, but I guess at least
someone in these tired arguments other than you has to be on my side.
Nikolaus Maack
>That still runs through the Abstract Expressionist sublime, no
>question, especially given the hype back then about Jung and the
>anima. The other of the unconscious is feminine, like the other of
>nature before it. I'm going to post later some longer thoughts on
>this I wrote while I was traveling.
[Pardon the occasional lecturing tone I seem to take on as I pounded
out the following.]
I think you might be slightly confused, at least in regards to Jung.
Didn't he say that men had an anima, the archetypal female, in their
subconscious, and that women had an animus, an arechetypal male, in
their subconscious? (That's what they taught me in my psych courses,
oh so very long ago.)
It could even be argued -- using Jung's own theories -- that everyone
has both the qualities of anima and animus in their head. That is,
each gender walks around with both an "ideal male" and an "ideal
female" in their psyche. The anima/animus tends to be based, I
believe, on your particular culture and your personal preferences.
Some men walk around with Pamela Anderson for an anima, others walk
around with Dorothy Parker.
We were warned, in psych lectures, not to project our ideal male or
ideal female on to our relationships. That is, you're with your
girlfriend, but you expect her to be as cool as Dorothy Parker. When
she doesn't live up to your ideal, you become extremely irritated.
The ideal is an impossibility, of course. The real Dorothy Parker
couldn't live up to your ideal anima-Dorothy-Parker.
You should keep in mind that the anima and the animas are just two of
many Jungian archetypes. There's also the Shadow, the Wise old Man,
the Wise old Woman, the Fool -- and some other tarot based archetypes
-- etc. etc. Jung felt there was a lot of room in the human mind for
a complicated cast of characters that influence our lives. Given this
merry band of citizens in our skulls, it would be difficult to ascribe
a specific gender to our subconscious -- at least, according to Jung.
It's my belief that an individual can be dominated by specific
archetypes in their skulls. Or at least, this is a useful model to
describe a neurosis. An obsession with women and sex, for example,
could manifest in endless dreams of the anima taunting you. Or an
obsessive fear of death could result in dreams where you are faced
with a "death archetype" in your dreams. (Step forward, Mister Grim
Reaper, and show him what's he won!)
If you really want to put Jung in perspective, keep in mind that he
used to have long conversations with a demon (or was it an angel?)
that only he could see. In these conversations, Jung refined a number
of his theories. The guy was half psychologist, half mystic, but
that's why I love him so -- Jung, I mean, not Jung's demon.
>There may not be a collective unconscious, but I guess at least
>someone in these tired arguments other than you has to be on my side.
Well, heck, John, let me know what your argument is, more
specifically, and I'll let you know if I'm on your side or not. I'm
so open minded -- as the saying goes -- that my brain often falls out.
Nik
---
The Nik Maack Art Gallery
http://www.chat.carleton.ca/~mrtribe
Now with exciting TEXT explaining why
each painting should not be burned.
John Haber
>I think you might be slightly confused, at least in regards to Jung.
>Didn't he say that men had an anima, the archetypal female, in their
>subconscious, and that women had an animus, an arechetypal male, in
>their subconscious?
Sure. What else did I say? I thought I was saying that's what those
guys took Jung to say as well. If I specifically took the artist for
thinking he had an anima in his subconscious, not an animus, guess
which toward gender the period biased successful artists to be?
Nikolaus Maack
>>I think you might be slightly confused, at least in regards to Jung.
>>Didn't he say that men had an anima, the archetypal female, in their
>>subconscious, and that women had an animus, an arechetypal male, in
>>their subconscious?
jha...@haberarts.com (John Haber) wrote:
>Sure. What else did I say?
I thought you were saying that most people see the subconscious as a
female entity, period. Jung doesn't seem to, but some schools of
thought do have this bias. For example, my girlfriend's psychology
textbook has a huge painting of the mythical character Psyche on the
cover. She is portrayed as an attractive woman with roses in her
hair. I say attractive, although the way she's drawn, she looks like
she has some sort of horrible rash -- the rash is supposed to be the
red in her cheeks.
But many think of the deep dark recesses of the mind -- we could call
it the subconscious -- as female.
>If I specifically took the artist for
>thinking he had an anima in his subconscious, not an animus, guess
>which toward gender the period biased successful artists to be?
I'm not sure I understand this question. Are you saying that if you
talk about men having an anima (female qualities), women would get
angry? That somehow you would wind up ignoring female artists?
John Haber
about the human mind (just looking for ways into the background terms
for a painter like Pollock), I definitely agree a tradition Jung
wouldn't have bought thinks of the unconcious as female. That same
tradition likes to think of rationality as a male thing. Feminism has
helped get past that, I think.
I've been too glib about the role of women back then. Some posts, I
come off talking about Krasner's essential role in it all, including
Pollock's gestation. Other posts, I give you the postmodern dumping
on them as macho pigs. (If they're all males, that's how I could talk
about their reading of Jung as giving them the female unconcoiusness.)
I think it's more complex than that. Men really did get some edge,
they realy did undercut their own male stance through their approach
to the sublime and the unconscious, and the story of Krasner and Janet
Sobel is neglected. As I say, I'm waiting for the former's
retrospective to hit the east coast, and I swear, if I went to grad
school, I'd take the latter as a topic. It's one of those areas that
hasn't been totally colonized.
John