I spent yesterday driving around Los Angeles with Dan, his sister Jen, and her boyfriend Jonathan. We were out to catch the final day of two exhibitions: Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield, at the Hammer, and New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, at LACMA. We weren’t intending to see two landscape-based shows back to back, but I’m glad we did. Although the two exhibitions approach landscape from highly divergent perspectives, I found echoes of my own landscape investigations in each.
The Burchfield show, curated by Robert Gober, is romantic, expressive, and full of color. It includes a recreation of Burchfield’s 1930 exhibition at New York’s MoMA, the first solo show put on by the fledgling museum. It also follows Burchfield through his years working as a wallpaper designer, and his rise as part of American Scene Painting. For me, the most exciting part of the exhibition is the final room. Sparely hung, it is devoted to the large-scale watercolors Burchfield made in the final decades of his life. During these years (the 1950s and 60s) Burchfield broke his ties with American Scene Painting and returned to his youthful search for a romantic, direct connection with nature and his own experiences in it.
The paintings in this room radiate an exalted, ecstatic calm but also suggest a man deeply engaged in the world around him. They are both mundanely detailed and somehow sublime- we see cicada husks, dirt, river rocks, trees, flowers; but also calligraphic arcs of sound and shimmering forms suggesting light and energy. Entering this room I couldn’t help but think of the final segment of the recent Turner exhibition at the Met. Both artists seemed to find a sudden and extreme freedom in their later years, expanding upon a lifetime of painting with new passion and certainty. As Dan and I begin this new year (approaching our thirties and looking forward to a lifetime of creating) evidence of such long-lasting creative output is inspiring indeed.
In a very different vein, the photographers included in New Topographics attempt to approach landscape with an objective, impersonal eye. The LACMA exhibition is actually a “restaging” of the 1975 exhibition held at the International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House. It includes now well-known topographic greats like Bernd and Hilla Becher, Robert Adams and Stephen Shore, who participated in the 1975 exhibition, as well as additions like Robert Smithson and Dan Graham. The curators also commissioned a video installation from the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), whose contribution is the only contemporary work included.
As expected, the work in this exhibition takes a cool, analytic approach to landscape. Despite the emphasis on objectivity (and perhaps due to the lingering influence of Burchfield, which we saw first) I felt the sublime creep into this exhibition as well. In the work of Adams especially, I found an almost clinical sublime. He isolates and analyzes the landscapes he documents, but the images still retain a sense of the wild and the raw. In the case of CLUI, I see a combination of Burchfield and Adams. This sounds a bit illogical, but experiencing CLUI’s massive double video projection, drifting slowly over bleak scenes of oil fields in California and Texas, I felt a distinct sense of subjective passion infusing this objective “interpretation” of 21st Century Landscape.
update: another blog post/review of the show here.
Images:
Charles E. Burchfield, September Wind and Rain, 1949
Bernd and Hilla Becher, Loomis Coal Breaker/Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, 1974
