Our
Good Earth:
The
Landscape at the End of the Century
May-July,
1999
Hemphill Fine Arts
1027 33rd StreetNW
Washington, DC 20007
California, oil pastel on
paper, 1985.
Red and Yellow Horizon,
oil on board, 1988.
The exhibition Our Good Earth is a look at how contemporary artists are addressing
the landscape at the end of the century and, through them, how we see ourselves
in the land. The title for the show is drawn from a work by the great American
regionalist painter John Steuart Curry. Painted in 1940, Curry's Our Good
Earth, a masterpiece of its time,
expresses a nearly religious belief in American heartland values. In support of
the United States effort in WWII, Curry's painting was reproduced as a poster
and re-titled Our Good Earth, Keep It Ours. Some sixty years later each word in Curry's original title carries
equally charged, but changed meaning. It is artworks that show these changes,
some subtle and others dramatic, that we sought to assemble for this
exhibition.
The first atomic bomb was detonated over
Hiroshima only a few years after Curry completed Our Good Earth. No longer could the full impact of war be safely
thought of as an isolated catastrophe between nations. Along with the colossal
damage from an atomic blast came the drifting of fallout and the latent effects
of radiation. Ultimately, it appeared that no one could be spared the effects
of a nuclear war. The world-wide implications of the 1945 atomic bombing
changed our view of the earth. Subsequently, the kinds of landscapes artists
produce in the latter half of the twentieth century have changed.
Only a short five years after the bombing of
Hiroshima, coaxial cables crisscrossed the United States. Every middle to large
city skyline was decorated with broadcast antennae. These technical innovations
made network television possible. And, through this network came a new kind of
awareness. Any event with its supporting cast from any place could be
immediately delivered into our homes in sound and moving pictures. As a result,
we have become conscious of an ever-increasing number of incidents outside of
our immediate communities. This new consciousness came with a necessary kind of
emotional detachment. A single individual could not hope or be expected to have
meaningful reciprocating relations with such a multitude of events, characters,
or places. Conversely, the local and the personal could feel less significant
if it went "unbroadcast", or in the least, unrecorded. With almost
predictable regularity new technologies have appeared, each impacting society
and the environment. Each of these technologies has altered our view of the
landscape. Perhaps more than any other technology, television effects the way
we look at people and places.
Many landscape artists have reacted against
television's emotional detachment by creating paintings based upon an old
fashioned kind of observation. Like their 19th century counterparts, they work
within the actual landscapes they paint. However, their work can not help but
evidence the formal traits of a world subconsciously re-seen through the
mechanics of film and video. Other late 20th century artists see the world
consciously through the frame and effects of new technologies.
In 1962, one could say the environmental
movement began with the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Carson's passionate description of the present and
future effects of pesticides was an appeal for a new kind of guardianship over
nature. The land became re-politicized. What was "good" in the eyes
of the farmer and the consumer was bad for the dying songbird and those
choosing to commune with nature. For John Steuart Curry, working the land meant
protecting "our" children and a way of life. Good was direct and
easily defined. Today, one may be pleasantly lost in the beauty of a landscape
painting but never without an awareness of our potentially negative impact upon
the environment. Good is no longer easily isolated from bad. As the
environmental movement influenced thinking about nature, other more difficult
and philosophical ideas about our relations to the earth arose. Biologist James
Lovelock theorized that all living species are components of a single organism,
Earth. The earth's biological processes are directed towards its survival,
while the safety or survival of humanity is not Earth's ultimate goal. Nor are
we nature's ultimate achievement. Further stated, humans are only a special
arrangement of some earthly stuff because we humans think so. In this argument,
it follows that the environmental movement is merely another self-serving use
of earth.
Today, a landscape painting can no longer
merely allude to a pure experience. Like most of us, many contemporary artists
acknowledge and confront a myriad of environmental viewpoints, while those
artists working in more traditional styles "recall" an uncompromised
good earth. Both approaches reveal our emotional need and psychological
response to a changed awareness of our relationship to the land.
In
79 AD, the Latin writer Pliny the Elder wrote of the specialized depiction of
open-air vistas. Pliny describes the artist Stadius as "he who first introduced
the most attractive fashion of painting walls with pictures of country houses
and gardens, woods, hills, fishponds, canals, rivers, coasts and whatever
anyone could desire, together with various stretches of people going for a
stroll...fishing and fowling...." From Stadius’ earliest landscapes up
through the 19th century, humans, often religious or allegorical figures,
architecture, and/or animals were requisite content in landscape paintings. In
1969, nearly 2000 years later, when Neil Armstrong walked upon the moon he
looked back at earth awe struck by its beauty. From Armstrong's viewpoint no
human beings were visible. It is in the twentieth century that humans
disappeared completely from landscape painting. One wonders if the
disappearance of humans in landscape painting is due to our need to see the
land as pure, good, and untouched. Or like the view from the moon, could it be
that humans are beside the point in our perception of nature's beauty?
Among
today's landscape collectors there is a persistent and clear preference for
work absent of humans, architecture and animals. As we all know, artists do not
necessarily paint to the preferences of collectors. More importantly, as some
twentieth century artists have pursued a strain of painting in which the
landscape is "pure," others have made the difficult questions about
our relations to the land their subject matter. Those artists addressing the
difficult questions have reinserted humans and architecture back into their
works about the land. Moreover, when we take a wider look at how art at the end
of the century embraces the landscape, what we find is diversity of commentary
and content.
Boundaries between businesses, institutions, and nations break down as more of us discover the democratizing force of the Internet. As we the Internet users connect across these borders, our cultural barriers dissolve. What Curry referred to as "Our" can no longer be protected. Today, and only for now, an American culture dominates the business of the Internet but as modem-ization spreads across the globe no cultural identity can be dominant, much less isolated and uninfluenced. From the beginnings of this century artists such as Picasso generously borrowed from other cultures. In the future, it is likely that there will not be a sense of borrowing from other cultures, but that a more thorough and subtle merging of cultures will take place. By the end of the next century there may be one continuously evolving world culture. No doubt, the connotative meaning of Our Good Earth will change again. With a kind of deadpan humor Ben Howell Davis's painting Red and Yellow Horizon, with its reference to China, points to this inevitability. It is appropriate to our show that Davis rendered this statement as a landscape painting.