The essence of the visual arts is to show what things look like. The visual arts can also offer designs or illustrations of ideas, but those are not the main thing. Picasso’s “Guernica” shows the anguish of a gored bull and viewers read about it to learn that the painting was about the Spanish Civil War. The commentary, not the picture, told the viewer that. Lenze’s “Crossing of the Delaware” commemorates an important event in American history and so convey’s patriotism, but what the viewer sees is all these people jumbled together in a boat and wondering whether the boat will capsize. More important as for the aesthetics of the visual arts is that each of the major genres of the visual arts find the particular subject matter whereby what is to be shown. Still lifes show arrangements of articles so that the juxtaposition is quaint of vases and fruit or even rotten fruit so as to gather the experience of having all of those experiences put together for their textures or shapes or the different kinds of those things, some ceramic, some organic, some sleek, some mottled. Portraits, for another example of the genres of the visual arts, show faces for whatever it means for people to interpret what is to be made of faces, how faces reveal or cover up minds. You may look at Rembrandt’s “ The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild” as a presentation of how important people are meeting with one another, and so a record or a commemoration of that event, but the primary thing to notice is the faces, what particular people look like and how they are different and the same as people’s other faces.
The essence, or the essential qualities, by which landscapes show what they show as a genre of the visual arts is their evocation of expanse and accuracy. While we use meters and feet to measure distance, those do not go into the experience of feeling space as covering space or offering an expanse, while painters have done that since the late Middle Ages when people could look out the window and down between the mountain ranges so as to see the bay beyond as being very distant, engendering the sense of what an expanse that might be. It also happens when people as little figures are placed far distant from what they are looking at, whether Frederic Church’s “A View of the Andes” or Thomas Cole’s “The Oxbow”. Nor is required a bird’s eye point of view. An artist can provide a sense of distance by portraying a single road on an incline leading up to a barn, every clod of earth marking a distance so as to defy Zeno’s paradox in that somehow one pace after the other, none observed, add up to getting where the path will come. Space is experienced as expanse rather than as measured. As for accuracy, painters, whatever their styles or techniques, have tried to capture what the landscape looks like, whether its colors or shadows, or fields going to the mountains, or what trees look like, or fields cleared orr nearly cleared of trees. Those are moments in the history of horticulture and forestry but mainly snapshots of what distances in every direction were at that moment.
Architecture is the singular exception of the visual arts in that it is not a representation of something else, whether of colors in space, and also about expanse, but about nothing at all except their predecessors serving as modes or modifications, like Greek Revival Art in early America, ot what its technological developments allow it to imagine, such as the cantilevering of windowed walls in the Lever Building. Architects are free and cursed by doing whatever they want to do so long as their patrons are pleased.
The essence of the visual arts are entirely different from that of the narrative arts, like epic or the novel in that the narrative arts are devoted to the elaboration of time rather than that of distance. Events occur, whether in circumstances recorded or dialogue propounded, that change things that happen and so move a story from one time to the next. Odysseus finally comes back to Ithaca after his wanderings and still has to decide what to do next, to change the arrangements on the island. Time doesn’t end and mostly narratives just are tied off so as to end. Will Elizabeth and Darcy get it off as a married couple? Only in politics do we accept that time never ends, that there will always be a new campaign with a new set of figures and issues to keep us amused and bemused and angry. That time changes happen even if in a Chekov play that nothing seems to happen when there are flashes of understanding within the people or in the audience about what has altered even if only in an awareness that is different. Most of the time, people spar with one another so that they become more engrossed with one another whether in Shakespeare’s comedies or in Jane Austen’s comedies, or circumstances in Dickens are set off course and the reader wonders whether anything will be restored or shunted onto a new beginning, altered either way by what had transpired, whether with Oliver twist or with Pip. And, of course, there is another order or genre of literature, which is the law or the theory or the principle, where the idea is to get rid of time and see all events as exemplifying that idea as if it could not go otherwise, repetition after repetition after repetition while novels make each one of them new however hackneyed may be the story that unfolds true to and so satisfying for its generic nature. The Ten Commandments were and will always be true even if the Israelites had not fully recognized these sets of words written in stone beforehands and however often they and others subsequently violated them. Either Freud was right or wrong about infantile sexuality. There is no hedging. That is the literalism of science and philosophy.
The landscape as having extension as its subject matter lasted perhaps until Whistler who had panels of black and purple make up the pillars and shadows of bridges that constructed Rothko like figures or perhaps happened even earlier when fireworks and artillery and sunsets allowed Turner to portray slow or short shifts of color. In either event, design replaced expanse as its primary drive of landscapes. That has become very clear in the late Twentieth Century.
A good example of this is the later work of Alex Katz, who was prolific and diverse in his paintings of his old age, while still maintaining the simple, unshadowed lines and clear colors that had made him a recognizable figure in his earlier days when he had a Rashenbach like ability to imitate comic art so as to make it art rather than make fun of it, finding that very few inflections were enough to portray a character. Katz moved to trees in the last decade of the Twentieth Century, a theme also picked up by Hockney, its critics thinking it a minor contribution to the Hockney opus. In his “10:30 A. M.”, Katz portrays a number of thin tree trunks separated but nearby to one another, each one flecked with white markings or features, perhaps part of the bark on their trunks, interposed with even more slender trunks stripped of bark, both kinds of which are set in a green background.
What Katz offers is a picture of the outdoors in that a wood has a jumble of lines in it that are likely to keep people from looking at vastness when they are in the midst of wood. Even though it is possible to see the picture as the art of design, the way lines stand next to one another in two types, more important, I think, is that Katz has captured the idea of the outdoors, of how its lines, however distinctive one from the other, make up a blur of lines as happens outdoors. So the painting is a conveyance of the experience of being in a wood and so not just a design independent of its setting. It is its setting. But as atmospheric as it might be, this painting is not a landscape because it does not offer vistas or portray the expanse of nature but rather tries to show people closed off within their woods by their trees.
The same thing happens in a very different way in Katz’s “Camp”. No near parallel lines or trees or even foliage. Rather just three squares of lighted windows like those illuminated by light bulbs that are orange and so dim which are the only illuminations seen in the distance from a green background where objects are not clear and so rends the house, the camp, as civilization against nature, the almost darkness the nature of things that people have tried to illuminate a little bit since the time of the cavemen and even present today when people on a highway pass at night of a house in the suburbs where the illumination is not too bright but shows that people are here, huddled in their homes against the dark. Cities are different because the light can be overwhelming but most of the time, even in cities, most places have only a few lamp posts to mark civilization, the streets as dark as if they were rural roads or even only paths. Again, this is not decoration, only simplicity in that the lighted windows are enough to create situation, tension and atmosphere.
There are inklings and extensions of the older tradition of the landscape, which is to offer an expanse of land and sea so that you get a sense of its immensity. I am thinking of “Streambed, the Palouge, Washington”, a chromogenic print by Verginia Beahan and Laura McPhee that is presently on display at the Getty Museum. It shows at the bottom of the artistic rectangle, and so closest to no present observer, a host of green and yellow flowers, slightly on a rise of what is farther away, similar to “The Oxbow”, where there was also a rise but where a painter stood so as to orient the scene, this regarded by the two photographers as an unnecessary convention. Then the viewer looks down (literally, up) to soft hills green and to their right red, these without growth, or just the suggestion that there is any flat vegetation. There is a single tree on the far upper left. In the center of the picture is the streambed that has some green around it but not clearly defined, perhaps because it is so far away.
The topography and flora are interesting and unusual in that these are features that seem not to be worth noticing in that there are no striking features, only the blending of soft colors on a rolling landscape with a low amplitude and a meagre streambed, so different from the riveting Oxbow that focuses a viewer, like the artist, at its geographical crux. It is as if nothing happened or was noticed. Also to associate with the picture is a lack of a clear measure to compare how large a place is what has been seen, and so gives the viewer a sense that it is as immense as the viewer can make it because it is so unmarked by signposts, whether of buildings or roads, as happens in Ingress’ “The Lackawanna”, nor any interest in the intersection between civilization and nature. So the authors have made something distinct by doing things differently but also to the same point of feeling a sense of space as extended just so as to get that.
There is a wholly different way of portraying an expanse that is available to visual artists that is surprisingly recent in origin. Which suggests that the age of miracles about representation is an age that has not ended or that there just was a quota of possibilities that existed within the very idea of representation or even of visual representation of expanse. I do not know of the precedent before the mid Twentieth Century of representing expanse by seeing next to very large things very small things, which has become central in science fiction movies but was not there in “Destination Moon'' of 1950 where Robert Heinlein imagined the first trip to the moon. There may have been precedents in astronomy or illustrations of what it would have been like to stand on the moon and see the Earth before that, but Kubrik’s “2001” in 1969 had visualized and conceptualized the issue clearly, self-consciously.
The central conceit in that section of the movie is the approach of a space flight onto the rotating space station, it only partly completed As it moves closer to its object, control sets are used to align the spaceship with its orientation, the viewer having difficulty seeing which end is up. And the spacecraft looks smaller and smaller with respect to the space station. Finally, the spacecraft enters into a portal and finds itself much smaller in perspective as it descends layer and layer, floors and floor, of technical people until it comes to rest, very small in the innards, just as happens later on in Star Wars where a spacecraft is also engulfed by the flight deck of fighter ships. The scales of the sizes of the objects must have looked as out of proportion as looking at an ocean liner looking next to a dinghy, an appreciation of outlandish size that John Ford conveys for a traditional landscape when he shows the immensity of land covered by the cavalry as it goes past Monument Canyon. Kubrick gives appreciation of the previous way to rend distances when he has the landing of the spacecraft descend between hills where some suited up moon explorers doing their work on the surface, like a Hudson River School painter looking at an event from afar from the point of view that is nearby. To me, the images on the spacecraft, the landing in the revolving satellite and then on the moon, are clear, while the drama about Hal the computer seems contrived, as is the muddle of what happens in the ornate apartment where the old man is quartered. Kubrick found fresh images of very different sorts in his movies, especially the Eighteenth Century greenery and arrangements of figures in “Barry Lyndon'', but the passage of film I have alluded to in “2001” is his greatest achievement, he having, as I say, invented a sense of how immense space is because of the relative proportions of the things in it, something astronomers and painters of distant planets had accomplished before Kubrick but not nearly as comprehensible.
Most science fiction is not about expanse. Heinlein was about political organization, sometimes Fascistic, as in “Starship Troopers” and sometimes Liberal, as in “Double Star”; Asimov (and the Starwars series based on it ) by “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, and Hal Clement about how intelligent biological species could be very different from one another. Kubrick was devoted to the idea of expanse. Remember that immediately before the spaceship is a stick hurled at the enemy protohumans across a shallow expanse of water. One tribe of them were rantin their anger against the other and then the genius covered space by hurling one projectile at the other group and killing him. Both groups were surprised that it was possible to overcome distance, to answer simple rage with action. The important facts is not that Cain killed Abel, which remains a mystery, but in Kubrick’s anthropology, how it was done, and that was by conquering distance. And so distance is very old, or imagined as being so, but its presentation, its appearance as vivid, alters, however slowly, one epoch of expanse replacing another, and the deep significance of that uncertain, however much historians can speculate about where the space between mountains and down to the sea opens up the modern world with its peculiar infinities of physics and human possibility.
