Not Calling The Green Leaf Grey: Notes on Seeing and Glenfiddich (Distilling an Art Ecology in 12 parts)
Judith Findlay
1.
The body of Edwin Muir, one of the twentieth century’s finest poets, lies in the churchyard at Swaffham Bulbeck near Cambridge and on his gravestone is written:
‘…his unblended eyes saw far and near the fields of Paradise.’
I know this, not because I have visited Muir’s grave, but rather, because the words were recently quoted as part of an order of service: a service of worship that took place in the small, local Episcopal Church that stands on the hill on the outskirts of my village, and which celebrated art and wonder. Since then, as I have gazed on Glenfiddich, and contemplated its art, I have thought a lot about these words. They have stuck in my mind. Not only because the countryside, the landscape, this place is beautiful (is, if you like, ‘heavenly’), but also because the words tell of a type of seeing that is distilled.
The seeing that the words speak of implies a vision that is ‘unmixed’: it ‘hives off’, pares down, and concentrates. This is seeing that focuses on and sets apart ‘raw material’ – ordinary, everyday stuff – and highlights it as extraordinary, unique or strange.
The words are a gift not least because they create a nice (albeit somewhat obvious) link between art and whisky! But much more than this they tell of the wonder of seeing and thus bear witness to a wonderfully special artistic process of editing (of making) that takes common views and, to use the words of Michael Mayne,
‘the commonplaces of human experience and distill[s] them, intensifie[s] them, so that we see the familiar transfigured. Often with quite a small vocabulary of visual images [artists] work a miracle.’
What if the artists at the Glenfiddich Distillery are involved in a process that is not unlike the process of making whisky? Suffice it to say that the artists I met there did appear to be involved in forms of ‘transfiguration’ (in working ‘small miracles’) - in, to put this slightly differently, intensifying the everyday.
2.
David Blyth’s ‘alchemy’ for example hones in and creeps up on a place somehow, subtly and slightly changing its ‘normality’ to make it noticeable and memorable. In a sense he examines and highlights ‘the local’ (the near-at-hand, the familiar, the easily-taken-for-granted) and proposes it as intriguing and exotic. Strangely, as we sat talking and drinking, a tiny taxidermy shark lay eyeballing us from the middle of the table (David had fetched it from amongst a large collection of such things in his studio to show us). But close up, strange things can look quite normal (and normal things quite strange). Auden puts it far more beautifully:
‘Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links,
Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks,
Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and sigh
There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.’
Later, we considered the illicit still that Blyth had created in a derelict cottage next door. It wasn’t so much an artwork as a part of a larger ‘set’ or ‘situation’. The faded kitchen in which it sat proposed an eerie backdrop for an implied, felt and as yet unplayed-out drama. Blyth said he hoped to make a film in the cottage and in fact the ‘performative’ is something that is often implied by Blythe’s work. He loves the idea that a place can have a voice, a persona. The old house tells a story, a malt shed becomes a theatre, and nature (deer, horses, animal tracks, forests, caves, rocks, rivers, pools, springs, grassland, foliage and so on) in all its abundance and variety is observed, catered for, looked after and listened to carefully (scientifically, reverently). These, and other ‘special’ places – wells, monuments and ancient sites – are even ‘tuned into’ and ‘recorded’ and Blythe has created ‘a digital audio device’ called Sonic Deer Antler especially for the job.
3.
We walked on to Matthieu Manche’s cottage and arrived to find all the floors covered in tiny scraps of paper. Each room around its edges was carpeted with minute and colourful pieces of Japanese graphic art and cartoons lovingly laid out around the skirting boards, one beside the other. Manche collects these cut-out pictures. He uses them as source material and inspiration and, I suppose, as a way of remembering here his adopted home of Japan (Manche is from France and now lives and works in Tokyo). There was something quite striking about looking at the ‘noise’ of these mass produced (and mass consumed) images in the relatively peaceful context of a remote stone cottage in the heart of Scotland surrounded by mist, rain and mountains and predominantly by the colours of green, grey, black and brown. As Manche himself said, the contrast of the Scottish countryside (albeit that it is also a site for Scottish commerce and industry) with the Tokyo cityscape he is used to almost couldn’t have been greater. Having said this I am sure they drink whisky from Glenfiddich in Japan, just as many Japanese tourists visit and enjoy the Glenfiddich Distillary and its facilities and environs all the time. Manche’s solution is to distill these two views – Manga comics and Scottish tourism – into one to produce a number of startling ‘comic-strip type’ pictures that depict a weird and rather dark and disturbing vision of well known landmarks and points of reference around Glenfiddich and Dufftown. These places become re-created as backgrounds and scenes for the stories and adventures of various familiar good and evil Japanese cartoon heroes and villains. In turn, these characters somewhat incongruously inhabit a small Scottish town instead of, say, a futuristic city, far-off land or outer space. Interestingly, Manche also suggests an alternative reality-drama for a place and thus invites us to re-consider that place anew (he also shows the exoticness of the local). It would be far fetched to say that Manche tells the truth in these pictures. Nonetheless, by stretching the limits of truth he does ask us to reflect on the truth of what we see – to consider beyond what we look at.
4.
I need to pause here for this brings me to a problem. For according to Mayne, who cites my opening quote in his book The Sunrise of Wonder, Muir’s epitaph has been mis-quoted. As his headstone tells us Muir did not see with unblended eyes but rather with unblinded eyes. Apparently then, this is not a description of ‘choice’ – and thus, ‘knowing’ - (artistic) vision, but instead one of seeing (imaginatively, and therefore, as if) for the first time (and so, apparently, it is a vision that appears more innocent than knowing). At the same time however, it is clear that although these words also tell of the miracle of seeing wonderfully they do seem to represent a contrary view of seeing to the one I just described. After all, ‘unblended’ suggests a view that is singular, whereas ‘unblinded’, as we learn here, refers to seeing doubly. It occurs too, that while ‘unblended’ sight might imply purity of vision, sight that is ‘unblinded’ has more to do with seeing relationships between things – between for instance what can and cannot be seen. In effect then, seeing with unblinded eyes suggests hybridity. So unblinded seeing might have more to do with, let’s say an ecology of seeing rather than one of distillation. Whatever: my gift – my whisky-word for seeing, and my beginning for this essay – would seem to be unproved.
Still, the word ‘unblinded’ does also refer to the wonder of seeing - in this case the wonder of seeing, clearly, both ‘far’ and ‘near’. As such, it describes a tension - a tension of a ‘double vision’. Mentioning Blyth and Manche’s work in relation to ‘distilled’ sight is one thing. It’s pretty clear though that they show – and practice – ‘double vision’ too.
5.
Wilhelm Scheruble had transformed his garage into a piece of art called Tension. After removing the garage doors so that the interior could be clearly seen from outside, Scheruble then painted the walls, ceiling and floor white. Into this cube, Scheruble had then installed fence wire, stretching lengths of it from wall to wall and from ceiling to floor until the space within resembled a cage or security system. At any rate, access to the garage was now impossible. In the course of his stay at Glenfiddich, Scheruble had become increasingly aware of the particular device that is used to stretch and tighten wire fences in Scotland. This is extremely common and well known around fields here but because it is not part of any system used in Austria (where Scheruble comes from) he had not seen it before. This then was the means by which Scheruble stretched out his pieces of wire in his garage: each length made taught with an apparently, particularly Scottish tool – a thing so mundane here that it largely goes unnoticed and therefore unseen by the majority of people. At one level, Scheruble made an unexpected, simple and satisfying statement by shedding light on a ‘hidden’ detail of our everyday life because he found it interesting. I think though his work can be read at a deeper level. As Mayne explains, ‘double vision’ describes how, for instance, artists ‘…look at reality as if for the first time and try to see it with eyes which see beyond the surface appearance’. It describes how they see ‘with, you might say, sacramental eyes’, and how they ‘[find] wonder in a world full of mystery.’ It describes how in fact some artists see ‘the holy in the ordinary, sensing how matter is the vehicle of spirit.’ Scheruble looked at a device for causing tension and saw (and made) a picture of the tensions that he felt at Glenfiddich: tensions of for instance, past and present, stasis and change, the individual and community, nature and culture, regeneration and death, the ‘known’ and the ‘unknown’, the visible and the invisible, matter and the spirit. Tension was one of a number of works that Scheruble worked on around Glenfiddich that whispered of the ‘tension’ of the mystery of the ordinary. This tension is something we all live in. It’s a duality – or, rather, a many layered ecology – in which we all are held and when it holds in balance the tension doesn’t pull apart but rather, somehow, creates a whole. This is the mystery. Perhaps therefore there is a better image: for when I think about it now, Tension didn’t resemble a cage or a security system so much as a network or organism (and maybe even a body).
6.
This brings me to the work of Little Warsaw, for ‘networks’, ‘connections’ and ‘systems of relations’ are keywords that remind me of it’s practice too. Little Warsaw consists of a collaboration between the Hungarian artists Balint Havas and Andras Galik. It formed soon after the pair’s 1996 exhibition at the Polish Institute and was a response to the changing political and social scene during the early nineties in Eastern Europe. It has since existed and functioned as an ‘umbrella term’ and a ‘space’ (physical, spiritual, discursive, contextual, theoretical and practical) for thinking, ideas and work. It provides a situation for practice: for reflecting on the environment of contemporary art and for making art works that question artistic, social, political and cultural environments. However, as Livia Paldi writes:
‘Their works are specific to place and situation insofar as the sculptures and their investigations rely on (beside the collective memory) the knowledge of a certain place in geographical and intellectual terms. They assume their viewer to be the member of a specific intellectual community, and assign him or her a “role of identification, which forces him or her to move constantly in a system of relations that is founded on the connections between real and mental space, experience and memory, the personal and the public.’
Paldi continues:
‘The key to interpretation is not manipulation but the reliving of repeated immersion. The possibility to relate the created work to the natural empirical world is interesting insofar as it points this out; what matters is the mental process the works initiate in us, the search for meaning, the “test of consistency”.’
I take this to mean that recognition is key: art works must be recognised as such - placed mentally and perceptively within a network of memories, imaginings, assumptions, prejudices, reasonings, thoughts and so on. Thus an art work exists as a social event and crucially the viewer plays a central part in this ‘performance’. In a sense then, Havas and Galik provide what might be called an ‘ecological model’ of art in which ‘the structure and texture of the environment itself is a necessary determinant of what is perceived.’ This, as Paul Rodaway explains, ‘[is an] “ecological” theory [that] not only gives importance to the environment itself in perception but also considers perception by a mobile observer.’
7.
I’m reminded here of a book, Ecologies of Theater by Bonnie Marranca. Elsewhere I’ve already argued that visual art is actually best perceived as an art of performance. An ecology of theatre therefore might appropriately lend a hand in creating a foundation for an ecology of art and it could, more particularly, assist as a means for looking hard at, for asking questions about and hopefully for understanding an art project such as Art and Authenticity.
Marranca says that:
‘A landscape is made up of things and people to be viewed in relation to each other. It doesn’t have to come to you; you must discover for yourself what is there. This pictorial composition replaces dramatic action, emphasizing frontality and the frame, flatness and absence of perspective. The play is just there. It has no center. Whatever you find in it depends on your own way of looking. Similarly, if you observe a view outdoors, the landscape seems stationary, yet life or inanimate objects are moving inside the part of it your eyes frame. Little by little you see and hear more, until everything reveals an expressive quality. This scene, like…landscape, makes itself known to you according to your individual powers of perception: you complete the view.’
This indicates that a centre of the scene is where one happens to be. Or, rather, instead of emphasizing any one central point in a landscape it highlights the need to perceive and transcribe a route through landscape (through for example the landscape of this art project). Implied therefore, is that this is a route – a journey – (an ecology) that shapes both the traveler and the terrain.
8.
The directions Louise Hopkins gives me to her cottage lead me out of the Distillary, across the bridge and out of town leaving behind the signs saying ‘Whisky Capital’. I find myself, somehow, ‘off-stage’ and ‘behind the scenes’ of Glenfiddich: the perfectly mown lawns and manicured trees, the tidiness of the buildings (and the workers), the pathways and beautifully paved car park are left behind and give way to piles of storage barrels and dark, dis-used corragated iron buildings covered in bits of moss. From Hopkins studio window we can see what seems to be the backs of buildings – apparently we are beyond the tracks. But what we see, I think, is beautiful not ugly, satisfying not unsettling: an ‘Edward Hopper’ scene in the vein of paintings such as Dawn in Pennsylvania, 1942, Approaching a City, 1946 or Burly Cobb’s House, South Truro, 1930-3.
Hopkin’s studio was a place of contemplation – a lovely place to be. Her small and beautiful pictures hung around the walls and seemed to enclose one in a cacoon of stillness whilst also inviting possibilities for movement and even transcendance (the speech bubbles in her drawings contained no words - only space for silence). At first glance her paintings give one the feeling of seeing small snatches of forest - dense undergrowth and foliage, branches, leaves, berries and flowers. In one sense however, the images are more pragmatic than that, simply being painted on (and therefore seemingly tracing) the reverse side of patterned furnishing fabric (the already existing design of the fabric in turn being ‘highlighted’). But Hopkins’ paintings are far more than pragmatic highlights; they are not copies and are more than traces. For her images seem inside the cloth, not on its surface. Floating, as if beyond the image somehow, it is the image – the lines of the plants and flowers and so forth – recognised and seen through the cloth. One might call this the truth of the image (and the truth of the image seemed to have something to do with silence). Thus, of course, Hopkins does indeed paint forests, and even jungles, alongwith all the many other places and memories that you or I might remember and imagine. She sees, and paints, all my years’ dreamings (and perhaps your’s) into wallpaper, curtains, carpets, seas, trees, skies and hideaways. Of course therefore, she paints time as well as space.
Sean Scully once said that ‘looking at a painting is like ivy growing on a wall’.
9.
The question remains and continues to intrigue me though: do people (artists) see with ‘unblended’ eyes. Well clearly according to Mayne, and others, artists do practice an art of distillation. So I propose that this typo – this beautiful, fortunate coincidence of words - is actually something of a revelation precisely because, paired with Muir’s correct inscription, it illuminates and describes the practice of seeing all the more. It highlights how seeing (and therefore art) is a crafting together of ‘unblinded’ and ‘unblended’ sight. In terms of seeing one needs the other. Meaning (and wonder) is created by a ‘seeing in overlap’ – a debate between ecological sight and of sights that are distilled. This ‘overlap’ is the essence of artistic seeing, a ‘mysterious craft’ that asks us to look at and enjoy the image or object before us even as it also points at (and wills us to see and to be moved by) the clarity, purity, and truth, of a vision of something beyond. In short, to make this point more precisely, even as art ecology emphasizes the interconnectedness of art and of all things (of all ‘raw material’) it necessarily, simultaneously, emphasizes the need for a distilling of these things: the exercising of, for instance, (artistic) discernment with regard to the aptness of those ‘raw’ things to be connected with and to be set apart artistically.
10.
What am I trying to say about this Glenfiddich Residency? I think what I want to suggest is that in order to see this project one has to envisage it as an (art) ecology: a landscape of seeing. As a writer for instance one has to choose and cut a path seeing some things and missing or ignoring others. Sometimes one will see things close up and sometimes only in the distance. Sometimes only an aspect of a thing will be seen or shown. On other occasions one might have the time, the opportunity and the inclination to see a view in all its fullness.
I have a feeling that my view might be somewhat touristically ‘picturesque’ (and I can only apologise to the artists concerned, for what is contained here are only snippets of far lengthier and detailed conversations. Having said this I have genuinely attempted to explore ‘the inter-relatedness’ of thought and making, to meditate ‘on [some of] the networks [and patchworks] which’ comprise this ‘mental and environmental space.’ Perhaps, in walking within an artistic landscape such as this, there is a tension that one must carry and travel with – the tension of only looking at what one sees on the surface so to speak, coupled with actually understanding the true nature of it. Stephanie Bourne’s objects and images for example are not art works. Rather they are landmarks or signposts that indicate a practice that is a process: that is open-ended, on going, evolving, multi-faceted and organic. Bourne makes connections and her work spotlights context. Her work is people-specific and, in a sense her role may be likened to that of a director in the vein of film or theatre (Marranca’s words are particularly appropriate for Bourne I think). In Bourne’s case the projects – the ‘performances’ – she works on might begin now and continue for years, might only become apparent at certain points of time and place, and might lie low for a time and then suddenly come to life again. The objects and images she makes are symptoms and causes of this process, this explorative, investigative, creative process in which art is the journey. What one might say is that Bourne plants seeds of art works and that the ‘life’ of an artwork is founded.
11.
It occurred to me much later when I talked with Christine Borland and Ross Sinclair – as they each spoke of Glenfiddich almost as though it were a laboratory or a library, a place for fieldwork and for research where germs of ideas are hatched, hunches are followed up and materials are sourced – that perhaps this is the truest thing that one can say about this residency (that, in actual fact, this is the heart of its authenticity): that this is a place where art works can begin (Art and Authenticity is an ecology: a place called ‘home’). So as I think again of Sinclair’s practice – his enduring project of Real Life for instance signified perhaps most noticeably by the fact that he carries the words ‘Real Life’ tattooed across his shoulders - I wonder if we might yet see Real Life in Glenfiddich. This is Sinclair’s sign of everyday life. It is equally, to use the words of Michael Archer, ‘a sign that we can choose to recognise in that life a representation of other possible existences.’ As for Borland, maybe her fascination with the ‘hidden aspects’ of Glenfiddich - the filtering, planting and purification systems (and intriguingly the use of willow for example), the cycle of production, waste and renewal (and curiously the by-product of black fungas) together with access to other experts from other fields – may bear fruit. These are rumours and whispers (not yet fully known, recognised or understood) of possible and proposed things to come.
12.
It could be, in Bruno Latour’s terminology, that Art and Authenticity is a classic ‘quasi-object’: it shuttles between fields of reference (ways of seeing, points of view). Perhaps then it is a ‘delicate shuttle’ weaving together such matters as nature and culture, business and fun, tourism and community, commerce and friendship, the local, and the international, remoteness and centrality, then and now, here and there, you and me, the seen and the unseen and, of course, art and whisky.
‘That a delicate shuttle should have woven together the heavens, industry, texts, souls and moral law – this remains uncanny, unthinkable, unseemly.’
What then can be said about creative seeing - this craft of art? What can be concluded, or at least suggested about art at Glenfiddich? Michael Mayne’s words strike a chord and put it, thankfully after all these words, quite simply:
‘It is when we take things for granted, or get lured by the grasping, manipulating processes of the world, that we lose this sense of wonder and become indifferent to even the most familiar things that lie before our eyes waiting (as it were) to be noticed and affirmed. “There is but one sin,” wrote G. K. Chesterton, “to call the green leaf grey.”’
Perhaps then Art and Authenticity should have a subtitle: not calling the green leaf grey.
Notes
Michael Mayne, This Sunrise of Wonder: Letters for the Journey (London: Fount, 1995), p. 151.
W.H. Auden, ‘Song of the Beggars No VIII’, Collected Poems (New York: Random House, 1976), p. 119.
Livia Paldi, ‘Little Warsaw 1996-2002’, Little Warsaw (Budapest: Mucsarnok/Kunsthalle, 2003), p. 23.
Paul Rodaway, Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense and Place (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 19.
Bonnie Marranca, Ecologies of Theater (Baltimore, Maryland: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996).
See my thesis Fine Art as Performance (unpublished: Strathclyde University, 1998).
I am grateful for the words of Jane Lee in helping me to articulate this. See Jane Lee, ‘Recent Paintings by Louise Hopkins’, Louise Hopkins: New Work (Aberdeen: Aberdeen City Council Arts & Recreation Division, 1994).
Louise Scullion for example, talks of distilling one’s surroundings and influences in order to make artwork. See ‘Matthew Dalziel and Louise Scullion: An Interview with Judith Findlay’ in Art and Design (Profile No. 46, Public Art), 1996, p. 17.
Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (Picador: London, 2000), pp. 119-152.
The word ‘ecology’ derives from the Greek oikos meaning ‘home’ or ‘place to live’.
Michael Archer, ‘The Other Place is Here, Too’, Ross Sinclair: Real Life and How To Live It (Edinburgh: The Fruitmarket Gallery, 2000), p. 15.
Bruno Latour (Translated by Catherine Porter), We Have Never Been Modern (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1993), p. 5.
© Judith Findlay 2005