Thoughtfactory: Fleurieuscapes

an alienated art

If the Fleurieuscapes book is to be centred around a poetics of homecoming---with its associated words of dwelling, place, region, abiding and building, then the various words need to be unpacked.

Firstly, we need to unpack what is is meant by poetics. It is broader than poetry in that it implies a creative act that points to something beyond itself. This refers to poiesis or a bringing into being: an unending creative struggle to express that which conditions and informs our worlds of meaning and yet resists being exhaustively articulated in the terms of these worlds.

How does this conception of poetics relate to visual art including photography?

The starting point would have to be Kant, since it was he who first systematically outlined the logical grammar or conceptual machinery of aesthetics though his categorical separation of knowledge /truth as in the natural sciences, morality and aesthetic in modernity into separate domains. In the Critique of Judgement Kant acknowledges that scientific cognition excludes aspects of ourselves from its view of nature and that this must be accounted in other than cognitive terms.

He does this in terms of an aesthetics that is based on the imagination, autonomous art, intuition, aesthetic ideas, taste and the lack of concept. Kant, in other words, in inscribing art with the autonomous domain of the aesthetic relegates art and aesthetics to what is outside truth and goodness. Autonomous art is autonomous from truth and morality.

the poetics of homecoming

I have tentatively started to develop the idea of photographing the fleeting moments in the ordinary into a poetics of homecoming. What I have in mind is that my photographing humble things--an example is this body of work by Yamamoto Masao ----- emerges into a concern with homecoming in response to the state of homelessness in our contemporary world.

Homecoming can be considered along the lines of an overcoming of the state of homelessness. The philosophic conception of the homeless condition has its roots in Nietzsche's discourse on nihilism in modernity, which he understood in terms of the emptying out of the highest values hitherto.

Nietzsche's account is that the erosion of the highest values hitherto means that these values are losing influence and meaning for us, and that we have fallen out of the traditional stories or grand narratives. We are uprooted, and live a nomadic existence in a world without certainty, value, or purpose. We have dispensed with all the prevailing ideals, values and myths that traditionally provide solace. We are no longer at home anywhere, and there is a longing for a place in which they can be at home. Hence the state of homesickness with its nostalgic aching for a home where we belong.

Homecoming is an at-homeness, whilst the poetics (as poiesis) is a form of mediative thinking about the presence of place. This is contrast with the poet/photographer being in exile, always remaining in the foreign, and in a constant state of exodus ( as held by Maurice Blanchot and Gilles Deleuze).

fleeting moments in the ordinary

If my low key approach to the local Fleurieu landscape + seascapes has been one of immersion or absorption within the remnant scrub, country roads, and coastal rocks, then the pictures that emerge from this are of the moments in my ordinary, everyday world. They are pictures of vignettes and moments that are fleeting and often missed.

Then it dawned on me. This is not a project based work. Therein lies the problem I have been having. I have been trying to make it a project based work and it just hasn't worked. So I pushed the work into the archives where it lay forgotten. I felt embarrassed by it.

They are simple pictures of the present moment of things that are modest and humble--eg., seaweed and rocks as in this picture. They are of things that are imperfect, impermanent, incomplete, weathered. These are pictures of the present as the seaweed would have disappeared on the next days walk and the rocks would be covered with seawater.

a visual regime

I realised that my low key approach to the local Fleurieu landscape has been one of immersion or absorption within the remnant scrub. An example of this kind of crafting of the image:

This is at odds with the detached, disembodied neutral observer with an objective and ahistorical vision--what is known as Cartesian perspectivalism----which has been common in, or central to, mainstream photographic discourse. This perspectvalism or visual regime combines the Renaissance notions of perspective with the Cartesian ideas of a disembodied, subjective rationality in which the eye and its gaze are foundationally allied with transparency, operating as the abstract vanishing point of Renaissance perspective. Subjective rationality underpins photography.

landscape, writing, photography

I am really struggling with this Fleurieuscapes project.

I am not sure what to do with it, I am not very confident about the project and progress is very slow: I have only got as far as dividing the photo book into two parts---scrub/bush and coastal. I continue to make photos in and around my Fleurieu neighbourhood in Victor Harbor--- these currently emerge out of my scoping whilst on the poodle walks, but I am not doing every much with translating these photos into a photobook.

I also realise that the project has become situated in the landscape, writing and photography nexus, as I accept that the landscape is a kind of text, in that it is 'represented ' in a number of different ways by its inhabitants and artists. The landscape is thus a cultural construct with a certain kind of narrative, which in 20th century Australia, has traditionally been one about national identity. I am comfortable in finding myself working withn the landscape, writing and photography nexus.

Maybe my lack of confidence is because whilst the accounts of our literary and painted landscapes are common and influential, photography has tended to be characterised as a footnote to the history of painting. There is also the difficulties involved that result from the differences between a visual and a written medium--I realise that traditionally words and images are established as not merely different, but antithetical. Thirdly, photographic landscapes seemed to have been caught up in the old genres---the picturesque, the pastoral and the aerial.

Sarah Hill has pointed out that the theoretical complications of the relationship between landscape, writing, and photography have only been explored in a sketchy fashion. Maybe that is why I am floundering with this project/book? What I do know is that I am not really sure how to move away from the old landscape genres---ie., the picturesque, the pastoral and the aerial.

One possibility that I have come across is the pathway suggested by Marion Marrison's 1979 Bonnet Hill Bush series, which consists of a number of photographs of a patch of suburban scrub near where she lived in Tasmania. As Martin Jolly observes:

"Marrison found a microcosmic Australia literally in her own backyard. And rather than imposing a geometry on it, she finds a geometry within it, visually curating the fallen trunks and branches into an order which registers her own personal point of view, and her own presence as an aesthetic appreciator immersed in the environment — however modestly scaled."

The series takes the viewer deep inside the scrub with the camera focused on the ground, picking out fragments of fallen branches, twigs and foliage. So there is no horizon line or clear sense of scale.

degraded agricultural landscapes

Sadly, a lot of Australia's agricultural landscapes are in the grip of a slow death. It's not just the clear felling of the woodlands or the loss of life, that is species (plants and animals) extinction either. There is also drastic loss in life support systems.

The plagues of rabbits (introduced to the continent with the first fleet) invaded the rangelands, eating all the vegetation and leaving the soils exposed to wind and rain. Overgrazing by cattle and sheep, particularly during periods of drought, exacerbated problems; in areas where rabbits never flourished, cattle seem to have been equally effective in denuding the country.

Much of the one quarter of Australia that is not rangelands is being intensively farmed. There is salinity, in many places, and acidity in others, both of which are devastating this farm land.

intimate landscapes

This photo is made from an ecological perspective on the landscapes that have been produced by the economic development of settler capitalism. Today there is only scattered remnant vegetation left from the clearance for agricultural production in the Fleurieu Peninsula. It's not a pretty picture.

The photo of an intimate landscape --dead roadside vegetation-- is the opposite of a nostalgic picture of a cosy, rural life to a harmonious settlement that has its roots in the yeoman tradition in the form of soldier settlements. The state government, as a promoter of economic development, in the early 20th century was also the architect of a desired cultural landscape and social class that emphasised the virtues of small-scale family owned and operated yeoman farms.

The ‘ pioneer legend’---which saw white settlement as a battle to win the land, in which humans were evenly pitted against nature---is now a form of myth making, given the emergence of agri-businesses and the family farm becoming all but obsolete. The pioneer idea, in pitting settlers against the land was not only fruitless, in leading to the ruin of the settlers, but self-defeating in ultimately ruining the land itself.

Sellicks Beach + empire

The picture below is from a 2015 autumn photoshoot at Sellicks Beach, a southern coastal beach in Adelaide:

Photographing the coast is an example of how photography has appropriated the language of painting---in this case the landscape, in which nature is seen for its own sake. The pictorial representation of the landscape in painting emerges in the 17th century in Europe and reaches its peak in nineteenth century with Romanticism. The genre 'landscape' is a way of seeing and there are different views of the land--eg., those of the aboriginal people, white settlers, tourists etc.

an aboriginal absence

The settler's clearing of the Australian landscape during the white settlement made this land the white man’s. What is forgotten is the terrible violence meted out to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders at – and after – white settlement. There is a refusal, eg., by the Australian War Memorial, to tell the story of the violence that raged across the Australian colonial frontier after British invasion and occupation in 1788. That the violence took the form of a frontier war is often denied.

The ‘clearing’ of the landscape by the first European settlers forced Indigenous people off their traditional lands and into small Christian missions and government reserves.

What is noticeable about this landscape is the contemporary absence of Australian Aboriginal culture within the Australian landscape and the impact of European colonisation. You wouldn't know the history from looking at the pasture land and the scrubland.

the landscape as the ground of nationhood

The landscape had long been the neglected poor cousin in Australian photography. Landscape photography has remained stagnant since the 1950s, cycling through the same formats of the picturesque, the sublime, the pastoral and the aerial.

It's central historical function, established from painting, is that of being the site where issues of Australian identity were debated. These debates heated up in the 1970s with the political resurgence of the Left; feminism; the resurgence of Aboriginal activism; the impacts of globalization on regional identities; the beginnings of a shift in focus from Europe and America to Asia; and the beginnings of the modern Green movement's campaigns to save the wilderness. For instance we understand the significance of the Tasmanian wilderness through all the photographs of it by Olegas Truchanas and Peter Dombrovskis.