NO LAND IN SIGHT
ON WATER ARTISTS AND NATURE ARTISTS
The art world is sometimes a wet discipline. The motif of water meanders through it like a river with crude tributaries: It gushes, it burbles, it sloshes in paintings, images and installations - but without a recognisable line. We immerse ourselves into this enormous pool to bring some water artworks to the surface. There is nothing shallow about it. Nothing wishy-washy. Rather, fundamentally different specimens with obstinate characteristics.
On the art of painting water, understanding water and seeing water where there is none. And on the art of refreshingly transforming our view of the familiar.
Great wave overseas
It is a manga from the 19th century. It is a giant Japanese wave. A blue and white artwork silhouetted with razor-sharp contours against a uniform beige sky. No towering tsunami breaker, but just its smaller, less common counterpart: an "okinami" - a large coastal wave. However, it does not appear less destructive if we look at the spray, with its greedy claws grabbing down from the wave crest at the people in the three boats in the curve of the wave. Yet they seem to remain calm, as though nothing could disturb their inner peace. As though they had entirely given up the illusion of an "I" in patient expectation of the inevitable break of the wave, which has long since washed over their souls. It is a focussed pause, a self-induced merging with the outside environment, as we see with the Zen masters. Western mariners presumably saw their salvation in the panicked battle against the flood, in the desperate change of direction, in jumping overboard. For the Eastern world, their chance lay in quiet, in controlled expectation, in fearless, joint surrender.
Despite, or precisely because of this cultural disparity, the West was enraptured when this extraordinary colour woodcut with a wave motif found its way to Europe on Dutch ships in the 19th century. Masters like Van Gogh, Gauguin, Schiele, Klimt, all of them felt inspired by the work with the long title "In the Hollow of a Wave off the Coast at Kanagawa" (1823 - 1829). Its creator was Kasushika Hokusai , one of the most well-known Japanese artists in the West. A man who, with the utmost discipline and perseverance, made over 30,000 colour woodcuts in his life. In a style which was surely strange to the Western eye, the powerful outlines of many of his pictures and caricatures remind us of today's comics. And indeed, the artist from Edo, present-day Tokyo, referred to his graphic works as "manga" as early as 1814. What is today a collective term for Japanese comics, caricatures and cartoons, Hokusai used as his own made-up word for "untamed, unconventional picture".
Hokusai's wave woodcut was reproduced countless times and distributed all over the world. Nonetheless, it is one of thousands and thousands, indeed, maybe just one of millions of ocean scenes with which the museums and art galleries of our world adorn themselves. For how many painters in the past centuries anchored their easels on the coast and squeezed their wholly subjective impressions of the poverty, expanse, restlessness and power of our waters into a rectangle? There is probably hardly a more difficult motif than flowing, undulating water. "The sea is an idea. Or better, a journey of the imagination", as the painter Plasson in Alessandro Baricco's novel "Oceano Mare" explains the failed attempts, over a whole summer, to capture the sea on canvas with the "perfection of this swaying motion". As the story unfolds, Plasson, whom Baricco almost lets fall into despair in the face of the wave surge, the "unending process of creation and destruction", begins to paint with seawater. However, he still does not succeed in painting a picture of the ocean.
Pathos of the fleeting
Plasson's unusual idea of using water itself as an artistic material is currently becoming ever more significant. Above all in the field of sculpture, conceptual art and installations. For several days in the summer of 2001 in London, many people could be seen touching 13 man-sized melting snowballs that had been placed all over the city. They appeared to be fascinated by the presence of winter at the wrong time of year in the wrong place. A contrast that seems to confuse: Snow as art, as a bizarre sculpture; Snow as an unadulterated opposite to the urban world.
It was Andy Goldsworthy who had made and frozen the giant snowballs the previous winter, who then transported them to London for their frosty appearance on June 21. Since as far back as the 1970s, the Scot has been orchestrating nature's transitory aspect with infinite patience and thus also artistically brings water into play, in all its forms: He lays down for hours on end on a wet path when it snows so that at the end of the day he has made a dark silhouette, which will be covered up with snow again shortly afterwards. Similarly, he creates his short-lived "rain shadows" as a simple projection of his outline on a stone during a rain shower - even though they fade after only a few minutes in the sun. We may think this is a "pure waste". However, the artist likes the fact that his artworks disappear. For him, "the intensity of a moment lies in its brevity". If we were to artificially prolong the moment of art, according to Goldsworthy, then its effect would be overpowering. Thus he lets everything take its natural course.
Neither does the land artist want to change nature. He only picks up on forms, lines and contours in nature and develops them without destroying them. Strict in the classical sense, probing, without tending towards kitsch or the esoteric or anything too fraught with meaning.
At the same time, the artist broadens access to the sensuousness of our landscapes for us: He creates sinuous lines surrounded by powdery snow on a frozen river. He lets yellow leaves dance down a river, forms sculptural cones of ice and "paints" snow by letting it melt with coloured seeds. In works lasting days, he forms icicles into a single spiral, which winds delicately around a tree; he grows a dazzling winding line of ice over a cliff. In Baltic temperatures and without gloves, so that he can feel the materiality, the haptic quality, of his material.
Goldsworthy creates something that only exists for a short time before it thaws, melts, evaporates or is destroyed. Strictly speaking, even the reflections of light and colour on his ice sculptures are transitory. Goldsworthy captures the moments up until the death of an artwork, the persistent metamorphosis of his creation, in photographic intervals - for image documentation is the only solid thing that can show his work. The filmmaker Thomas Riedelsheimer accompanied the artist for over a year with his camera and created a sensitive documentary work, "Rivers and Tides", which was awarded various prizes including the German Film Prize 2003. A great deal of perseverance is certainly required to observe Goldsworthy working. When arrangements fall through or come off prematurely, when he has to wait for hours for high or low tide. And courage in the face of freezing conditions is also a must. "Good art keeps you warm" says Goldsworthy, before disappearing into the next cold and damp recess looking for unhoped-for treasures. This is a man who was at the North Pole for weeks to learn from the Inuit how to go about using frozen water as stone, and his hands do not get cold that quickly.
The history of the water-drinker
The new naturalism of recent decades has also inspired other artists besides Goldsworthy to work with water. We have seen works across a wide conceptual spectrum, which champion above all the principle of the elementary, of putting nature on show. Thus the famous artist couple Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who often create art by concealing things, are currently planning an artwork with water - "Over the River" - which will be finished in 2011 at the earliest. The couple plans to span part of the Arkansas River in Colorado with a free-floating material panel, with contrasting light displays in the spaces between the banks of the river and the panel. The material, a transparent fabric, is meant to reflect the contours of the natural landscape of mountains, clouds and vegetation and, obviously, accentuate it. Without directly taking centre stage, here the sealed water will be elevated to an artistic material. And similarly to the invisible bearer of meaning of the artistic idea.
In modern painting too, we find works in which water is present and yet is emphasised in a peculiar way. The painter Peter Dreher shows us nothing but a water glass that glares at us, cold and empty. Empty, and despite that the eye of the observer fills it with liquid and the brain immediately sends the impulse "drink". Because a glass that nobody drinks from looses all value. It is robbed of all right to existence. In the artist's exhibitions, visitors thus presumably tend to get very thirsty, for Dreher has painted the same water glass on a canvas about 4200 times in its original size since 1974. 4200 still lifes in an identical arrangement, the robust, cylindrical glass always at the same angle on a white tablecloth in front of the same white wall. 4200 times the same theme on 25 x 20 centimetres. Somehow refreshingly unspectacular.
Even 20 years after completing his first work, Dreher's thirst for painting that one and the same glass has not been quenched. The German artist can't see the point in that anyway: For him, painting's strength does not lie in a diverse choice of motifs. On the contrary, according to Dreher, the painting process can be best studied if you limit yourself to a single motif and keep the external conditions as constant as possible. Indeed, when looking at the exhibition frieze we notice that not one drinking glass is the same as the previous one. Instead, we are amazed by the impressive variety of detail. It seems as though Dreher is sensitive to the most fragile change in lighting and perspective, he transfers every nuance of his perception and mood to the painting process. This results in slight differences between the individual glasses in from the reflection of the light or shades of colour, which range from white-beige to blue-grey. Precisely because we can compare neighbouring pictures, we discover the attraction of colour of every individual work, as though the artist had reinvented it each time with the same desire for variation.
Behind the assumed monotony of the constant theme, the Galerie Rainer Wehr, where Dreher held an exhibition in November 2006, suspected an "affront against the addiction to ideas which society constantly demands". Yet it is more than that. "It is a ritual of Zen-like devotion", wrote the New York Times of Dreher in 1998. And for the artist, painting really is a Zen exercise, you can see that even from the title of the work: "Tag um Tag guter Tag" ("Day by day is a good day"). A Zen dictum, which links effort and reward in a cycle: Practice leads to success and success, in turn, leads to practice. Only the two together make the "good day". Thus in their composition, Dreher's images look like an infinite loop - no time seems to have elapsed between the first and the last picture in the series. The only recognisable characteristic is the consecutive number above the edge of the glass, soft, as though it is inscribed into the wall, the subtle hallmark of a visual impression which will never be repeated.
