Driving Through History: Driving the Future

By William Tillyer


Milk Stands


Untitled
The Furnished Landscape - Milk Stands
Photograph
1977

In 1977 I wrote a brief set of notes, published as 'The Furnished Landscape - Milk Stands', to accompany a collection of black and white photographs of 'milk stands'. These were roadside structures erected by farmers to facilitate the collection of milk churns. One reason for making the photographs, w as that I found people seemed to be unaware of the beauty and significance of these structures in the landscape. After all they were humdrum, make do affairs, their function was paramount, and masked their beauty. They were treated as beyond consideration, Expectation before their physical reality, where presence is put into a passive mode, while expectation and function takes precedence. Like the Skellig Rocks, signal rather than light, form and space are paramount. Psychology and seeing become as close as Jekyl and Hyde. They are inseparable.

The Luminists

Looking out due west over the Atlantic ocean, there has been the most amazing sunset this evening and I recall the painters, J.F. Kensett, Sanford Robison Gifford, or Fredrick Church. These artists, loosely termed Luminists(1850-75) a movement concerned with painting light in a particularly dramatic way. Perhaps they come to mind because prior to my Irish trip I had visited 'Olana' the studio house of Fredrick Church in the Hudson Valley New York. However, it may be more due to the abode I am presently occupying, a stone and thatched property, and the feeling that this landscape seems to have a greater resonance for the 18th century and 19th century than the present day. That is if a landscape can be thought of as belonging to a particular century. Certainly ways of seeing and thinking do become associated with a particular period, and like the milk stands, the psychology can not only be influenced by the object , the hardware, but the period as well.

This Kerry sunset is full of the most wonderful infinite space, certainly no more space than actually exists, yet the colours and their blends endorse this space and make me more aware. This golden filled space is the kind of motif that the 'American Painters of the Sublime', The Luminists, were so adept at painting. By constructing a two dimensional light filled space of a sustaining beauty. They would certainly have brought joy to an early Renaissance painter, newly fangled with the idea that his canvas / panel could be an illusion to infinite space, peopled like a proscenium stage, creating his view of 15c Florence. Just like the rapidly fading sunset before me, the Luminists were not going to be a significant notch on an art historical graph, after all Claude Lorraine 1600-82 had already dealt with a blinding, poetic, 'forever' light filled space in paintings such as "Fight into Egypt". Then Turner 1775-1851 delivered a final, Quod erat demonstrandum, prior to the inception of the Luminists, by opening the doors on the 20th century 50 years early with his later minimal canvases of light and space. Even while these American painters were still working, Cezanne 1839-1906 finally dealt with the painting of landscape, on a flat canvas by dealing with the problems of unifying form, space and light while retaining the dignity of the canvas surface, the picture plane. The artists Church, Heade, and Bierstadt were still out in the fields as Cezanne declared 'check mate', setting the 20th century on a path beyond the picture plane into a space of true reality.

But did Frederick Church and his fellow painters care, were they playing the same game, were they not simply painting pictures, albeit glorious light filled spaces pandering to our very real need for that 'sustaining beauty'?. A beauty which did not demand the intellectual rigor of Cezanne, after all, he came with the polarities 'reason and emotion' intact. The American painters were not concerned with the advancement of seeing; their picture plane was, 'a picture window'. Their paintings fulfilled a need and desire for a space where the mind could soar and expand, and was in essence 'of the spirit' if not like Caspar David Friederich 1774 -1840 having overtly religious symbolism.

Lineage for Cezanne could be found to go back to Giotto 1267-1337, and Braque 1882 -1963 and Picasso 1881-1973 were eager to continue that ancestry. Through his strong reasoning, tempered by emotion, Cezanne had led the way for the inception of Cubism, which is all well documented and a matter of Art History. This view of painting, of what I call the 'China wall' of Cubism,, because it deals so thoroughly with ideas of harmony, form and space, has proved to be impenetrable. Apart, perhaps, from Jackson Pollock, 1912 -1956 where he added a little more to the equation by reducing all his mark making to the one gesture. All further reductionist ideas would only lead to a cul de sac for ambitious painting. Numerous artists and isms of painting have attempted a way past cubism, but by putting a painters formalist stance to the motif aside, only Marcel Duchamp 1887 -1968 was able to circumvent the powerful dictat of Cubism: If I am an artist what I declare is art, is art. I do not need to alter the chosen motif but simply recognise it, I am not a conduit I am beyond visualisation. This new declaration truly brought painting to and beyond the picture plane and into the very space of the gallery, but for painting this was simply a side stepping solution. Even so it would add a new wealth to paintings scenario.

A gentle swell from the discovery of oil paint with Jan van Eyke in the 15th century, where the mark of the brush is eradicated by using a rich full fat oil medium, through to the fully loaded and impasto brush work of the Impressionists, finally brought Picasso, Braque and the Cubists up full frontal with the picture plane. Only the creation of 'Collage' allowed the image to travel further into reality, and experience a new reality while still being part of the picture window world of illusion. Collage extended that illusion into the gallery, into that magic space between picture plane and viewer, while still being attached to the canvas surface, Mark making now ran the full gamut from infinity to this side of the canvas to be just inside the gallery.

Return To Byzantium

The vanishing point had been, till now, encapsulated in the painters world. However, that was not an inheritance for the Russian artists, where, because of the Orthodox Church, and deep rooted links with Byzantine art; the Renaissance did not take hold. Thus in the first decades of the 20th century, perhaps because they did not carry the burden or baggage of the previous five hundred years they were, more than any others, able to exploit a newer and enlarged space beyond collage, one that was not of the sculptor or the painter. The work of these artists/ Constructavists, although not strictly painting, occupied a space often in relief to the wall, This now gave a new form to painters ideas.and could be called a 'Return to Byzantium'. A return to image making not by illusion, but by more physical means. The arena in front of the canvas was heavily annexed and became the domain of artists with ambitions for painting which were not simply readdressing the achievements of the Quattro cento. The Duchampian polemic and Constructivists view, now both discounted the painter's vanishing point, and his golden space.