PETER ROBERTSON

land marks

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Exploring Narrative In Land Marks Exhibition.

We use the term, and look at, ‘landscape’ with the hope that we refer to something picturesque. Occasionally, when all the elements in the ensemble are harmonious, we can be filled with a sense of awe and wonder at the beauty we find. ‘Landscape’ as a concept carries the assumption there is a viewer appreciating it. It is a cultural construct placed upon ‘nature’. With ‘landscape’ we have a long social and psychological history of constructs. We have learnt to appreciate certain qualities in the configuration of the elements within a scene before us, based on precedents in painting and, later, photography. Qualities such as a stand of trees in the foreground to offset the middle and far distance; or a road or river meandering through the scene to provide indicators of distance as it recedes. We see the ‘landscape’ as existing in its own right, entirely self-sufficient. We pick out elements from the view, a building perhaps, resting there a moment, then moving on, the building dissolving again into the background as the eye picks out something else as a feature, and so on.

Most often though, we pass over a tract of land without giving it a second thought, without pondering anything. If we thought enough about it to give it a name it would probably be something like ‘empty land’ or ‘vacant land’. But these terms are oxymoronic. They do not, they cannot mean the same thing as, say, ‘empty bottle’ or ‘blank canvas’.

This ‘empty land’ is just as valid as ‘landscape’ as a construct placed upon ‘nature’. The ‘empty land’ is also constantly conditional and transitional. Here too, each element can be seen as figure or ground. As our eye happens to pick something out from its surrounds the rest will fall away to a blurriness of background. [1]

 Building sites can be considered a sub-group of ‘empty land’. They are not picturesque in the manner of ‘landscape’. The term ‘building site’ however, sets up an immediate figure/ground relationship that is different to those described above; it is spatial, but also temporal. In this sense it is a black and white concept like ‘not pregnant/pregnant’. These terms only exist as a relationship; between what is here now and what is expected to be here in the future, its potentiality.

Nevertheless, we can appreciate the raw building site as the subject itself. This is what we first encounter when looking at the Land Marks images. We focus on the graders, the trucks, the stacks of steel and scaffold, ready to be used, the churned and levelled ground. But when construction begins and the building starts to rise out of the site our concentration shifts and the site assumes the relational definition of ground.

Building sites in general are permeated with a kind of abstract romanticism that vaguely references childhood memories of sandpits and Tonka trucks, of digging in the dirt, of building cubbyhouses, of making sand castles at the beach. But there is also the presence of a romantic potentiality, of the possibilities of raw elements: earth, concrete, steel, timber, glass.

The expectation, the potency, stems from the same root in our consciousness that gets excited when we are sitting in a theatre, the lights have just gone down and the curtains are about to part. The theatre, the lights, the curtains are the ‘ground’ upon which the performance, the ‘figure’ projects itself.

The state of potentiality also carries the implication of absence within it; that something is missing. If we are interested and capable of doing so, we continue to pay attention to the site over time. We imagine what kind of structure would go on the site or what we would like to see there. We come back to the site to see whether we are disappointed or pleased by what we see and whether the structure realises some kind of personal wish fulfilment.

What happens then, when we know that the building site we are looking at, as in Land Marks, has since been built upon and we also know its location? Then the absence is not about a hypothetical construction projected into the future, but a building that exists, a building we may have experienced in some way. If we have, then we can try to imagine the building fulfilling the absence, a phantom-like ‘presence’ as figure against the background ‘absence’ that we actually see on the canvas.

We bring to the image all our knowledge of the absent building: perhaps we have seen it, walked around it, even inside it. We may have looked at the view from the top of it. Or if we have had no personal experience of it, maybe we have seen pictures or read about it or heard stories related by friends. Even if we have no knowledge of the site we can look at the date and location and conjure up ideas about the kind of construction that might be there.

We can bring all this experience to the empty building site, and in doing so re-create the phantom building that we know to be there.

When we are looking at the Land Marks images in this state, there is a wavering between the figure and the ground. The images are, at once, both.

So the narrative takes place in the space between the ‘absence’ of the building sites (which can also be seen as physical presence) and the viewers conceptual filling in of the ‘presence’ of the building (which can also be seen as physical absence); an interaction back and forth conditional on the degree of experience the viewer brings to the image and which is, of course, different for everybody.

There is a narrative because there is a before and after. ‘[T]he living present is torn between a past which it takes up and a future which it projects’.[2] Standing here viewing these paintings of marks made upon the land is a ‘present’ experience which takes up a past viewpoint and projects a future outcome upon it.

At present we are standing in the future of our past.

Peter Robertson