Radical Landscapes, Tate Liverpool
Commissioned by Art Monthly, No.457, June 2022
So entrenched in our culture is the word and our imagined
relationship to it that when we hear ‘landscape’ it can’t help but evoke a
particular type of scene. Predominantly green, there will be trees; maybe a
farmer’s field; and a little brook or other body of water, bubbling along innocuously.
The epitome of a green and pleasant land. This is the very thing we encounter
early on in Radical Landscapes, the new exhibition at Tate Liverpool. It comes
in the form of John Constable’s Flatford Mill (‘Scene on a Navigable River’,
1816–17). Its inclusion is something of a red herring.
Painted at a time when such rustic nostalgia came to prominence and flourished here, today it serves to represent how things – we, society, expectations – have changed. This exhibition is nothing if not aptly named. It wastes little time in presenting the case that no longer is it enough to naively think of the land as we encounter it entirely benign, or to present it as such. A key question the show engages with from the off is who has access to this land. Who gets to tread, without fear of prosecution or micro-aggressions, our common land?
An astutely selected clip from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972) critiques Thomas Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews (c.1750) – a couple posed amid their rural idyl – thus: “they have become, not a couple in nature… theirs is private land… without a doubt, amongst the principle pleasures this painting gave to Mr and Mrs Andrews was the pleasure of seeing themselves as the owners of their own land, and this pleasure was enhanced by the ability of oil paint, to render this land in all its substantiality.” Berger goes on to mention that “if a man stole a potato at that time, he risked a public whipping; the sentence for poaching was deportation.” Difficult, when contextualised in this way, not to read this as landed gentry rubbing our noses in it.
And at times this does seem like an angry show. Here we see Hurvin Anderson’s Double Grille (2008), verdant nature out of reach behind the protective/exclusionary wrought iron screen of the title. Elsewhere there is a vitrine of ephemera including works on paper and books under the banner of The Festival of Britain, held in 1951 to engender national pride and recovery in the aftermath of the Second World War. Today, its inclusion can be read as pointed riposte to Brexit, the forthcoming white elephant of Unboxed (the rebranded Festival of Brexit) and the little Englander attitudes that led us to it.
Radical Landscapes’ is a controlled anger, though, one wielded judiciously. This allows for some smart curatorial choices and juxtapositions. In a section titled Militarised Landscapes, we find Henry Moore’s Atom Piece (Working Model for Nuclear Energy), a large sculpture that looks like the warped remains of the head of a gigantic metal god in the aftermath of a nuclear strike. Beyond the sculpture, your eyes land on a pair of lithographs, posters for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, one of which features a human skull and mushroom cloud – a chilling twin to Atom Piece. Worth noting that, when the CND was launched in 1958, Moore had been among its founder members. Nearby, our friend John Constable crops up again, punkily co-opted by Peter Kennard for photomontage Haywain with Cruise Missiles (1980), which inserts nuclear warheads into the quaint 1821 work.
But for all the arch nods and associations, at no point does the exhibition lapse into feeling like a lecture; nor is it ever overly bleak or dystopian. There is room made for quiet optimism In Turner Prize nominee Ingrid Pollard’s Oceans Apart, in which we find people of colour enjoying a day at the beach – a scene usually almost exclusively populated by white bodies. We find artists in conversation with the land and occasionally each other. Jeremy Deller’s fun and, dare I say it, highly instagrammable neon take on the ancient giant of Cerne Abbas reaches back to land artist Richard Long’s 1975 Cerne Abbas Walk. Derek Jarman’s experimental Super 8 film Journey to Avebury documenting the artist’s walk among Neolithic stones can be found nearby Barbara Hepworth’s Two Figures (Menhirs). Together they bring a welcome slice of English eerie to the fore. Great surrealist Claude Cahun’s familiar Je Tends les Bras, a 1931 self-portrait with a stone monolith, is one of a grouping of six works that bring yet further weirding of the landscape to proceedings.
The exhibition’s final section is dedicated to botany. A happy marriage of Western and Islamic traditions, Anwar Jalal Shemza’s Apple Tree (1962) sees a staple of Englishness fed through the filters of immigration and abstraction. Brimming with folkloric allusion, Eileen Agar’s almost psychedelic Figures in a Garden (1979–81) finds a pair of partially fragmented beings apparently composed of mulch and plant life. More of which can be found in the show’s climax: Ruth Ewan’s Back To The Fields (2015–2022). A so-called living installation, literally infusing the space it inhabits with life, it was inspired by the French Revolutionary Calendar (1793–1805), whose seasons and days were named in consultation with artists, poets and horticulturalists.
It makes for a serene, contemplative grand finale, one packed with plants, vegetables and flowers; it smells amazing. The inclusion of animal skulls, though, reminds you of the circularity of these things; and glance through the windows of Back To The Fields and you’ll spy Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Quin Morere (1991) – a guillotine.
Asking what a green and pleasant land is and to whom through the lens of this no longer young century, Radical Landscapes rises to the occasion to explore and contextualise complex, nuanced, and – often – unpalatable answers. Covering over a century of landscape art and featuring more than 150 works, it is an at times unwieldy exhibition; its relevance, however, and the ways in which it extends the parameters of what we think of when we think about landscapes, is inarguable.
Image: Claude Cahun, I Extend My Arms, 1931 or 1932, Tate Liverpool
Painted at a time when such rustic nostalgia came to prominence and flourished here, today it serves to represent how things – we, society, expectations – have changed. This exhibition is nothing if not aptly named. It wastes little time in presenting the case that no longer is it enough to naively think of the land as we encounter it entirely benign, or to present it as such. A key question the show engages with from the off is who has access to this land. Who gets to tread, without fear of prosecution or micro-aggressions, our common land?
An astutely selected clip from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972) critiques Thomas Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews (c.1750) – a couple posed amid their rural idyl – thus: “they have become, not a couple in nature… theirs is private land… without a doubt, amongst the principle pleasures this painting gave to Mr and Mrs Andrews was the pleasure of seeing themselves as the owners of their own land, and this pleasure was enhanced by the ability of oil paint, to render this land in all its substantiality.” Berger goes on to mention that “if a man stole a potato at that time, he risked a public whipping; the sentence for poaching was deportation.” Difficult, when contextualised in this way, not to read this as landed gentry rubbing our noses in it.
And at times this does seem like an angry show. Here we see Hurvin Anderson’s Double Grille (2008), verdant nature out of reach behind the protective/exclusionary wrought iron screen of the title. Elsewhere there is a vitrine of ephemera including works on paper and books under the banner of The Festival of Britain, held in 1951 to engender national pride and recovery in the aftermath of the Second World War. Today, its inclusion can be read as pointed riposte to Brexit, the forthcoming white elephant of Unboxed (the rebranded Festival of Brexit) and the little Englander attitudes that led us to it.
Radical Landscapes’ is a controlled anger, though, one wielded judiciously. This allows for some smart curatorial choices and juxtapositions. In a section titled Militarised Landscapes, we find Henry Moore’s Atom Piece (Working Model for Nuclear Energy), a large sculpture that looks like the warped remains of the head of a gigantic metal god in the aftermath of a nuclear strike. Beyond the sculpture, your eyes land on a pair of lithographs, posters for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, one of which features a human skull and mushroom cloud – a chilling twin to Atom Piece. Worth noting that, when the CND was launched in 1958, Moore had been among its founder members. Nearby, our friend John Constable crops up again, punkily co-opted by Peter Kennard for photomontage Haywain with Cruise Missiles (1980), which inserts nuclear warheads into the quaint 1821 work.
But for all the arch nods and associations, at no point does the exhibition lapse into feeling like a lecture; nor is it ever overly bleak or dystopian. There is room made for quiet optimism In Turner Prize nominee Ingrid Pollard’s Oceans Apart, in which we find people of colour enjoying a day at the beach – a scene usually almost exclusively populated by white bodies. We find artists in conversation with the land and occasionally each other. Jeremy Deller’s fun and, dare I say it, highly instagrammable neon take on the ancient giant of Cerne Abbas reaches back to land artist Richard Long’s 1975 Cerne Abbas Walk. Derek Jarman’s experimental Super 8 film Journey to Avebury documenting the artist’s walk among Neolithic stones can be found nearby Barbara Hepworth’s Two Figures (Menhirs). Together they bring a welcome slice of English eerie to the fore. Great surrealist Claude Cahun’s familiar Je Tends les Bras, a 1931 self-portrait with a stone monolith, is one of a grouping of six works that bring yet further weirding of the landscape to proceedings.
The exhibition’s final section is dedicated to botany. A happy marriage of Western and Islamic traditions, Anwar Jalal Shemza’s Apple Tree (1962) sees a staple of Englishness fed through the filters of immigration and abstraction. Brimming with folkloric allusion, Eileen Agar’s almost psychedelic Figures in a Garden (1979–81) finds a pair of partially fragmented beings apparently composed of mulch and plant life. More of which can be found in the show’s climax: Ruth Ewan’s Back To The Fields (2015–2022). A so-called living installation, literally infusing the space it inhabits with life, it was inspired by the French Revolutionary Calendar (1793–1805), whose seasons and days were named in consultation with artists, poets and horticulturalists.
It makes for a serene, contemplative grand finale, one packed with plants, vegetables and flowers; it smells amazing. The inclusion of animal skulls, though, reminds you of the circularity of these things; and glance through the windows of Back To The Fields and you’ll spy Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Quin Morere (1991) – a guillotine.
Asking what a green and pleasant land is and to whom through the lens of this no longer young century, Radical Landscapes rises to the occasion to explore and contextualise complex, nuanced, and – often – unpalatable answers. Covering over a century of landscape art and featuring more than 150 works, it is an at times unwieldy exhibition; its relevance, however, and the ways in which it extends the parameters of what we think of when we think about landscapes, is inarguable.
Image: Claude Cahun, I Extend My Arms, 1931 or 1932, Tate Liverpool