Reckoning with landscape tensions,reflecting on creative methodologies

Art as intensified sensations, as sexual selection

Given landscape arts historical association with visual pleasure and the more recent popularisation of nonrepresentational theory across cultural geography, in this paper I revisit the issue of desire through a more-than-representational approach to landscape art. If landscape is tension, as Wylie explains, then what becomes of desire? ⁴² When landscape moves between the representational and nonrepresentational, distance and proximity, looking and immersion, where does pleasure reside? Is it possible to account for more than visual pleasures in/through landscape art? And how might creative methodological exploration of landscape account for pleasures? It is by developing and reflecting upon an experiment with participatory method that this paper uses Grosz’s reflections on art to explore these questions. ⁴³ Grosz’s writings have much to contribute to creative explorations of landscape tensions given that her theorisation of art is inseparable from a post-humanist and affective notion of sexual desire. ⁴⁴ For Grosz, art is the materialisation of energy and forces, such as that of the cosmos, biology and geology, through the making of sensation. ⁴⁵ Grosz understands sensation as ‘the zone of indeterminacy between subject and object’, that is not as the subject or the object, but rather the unfolding of both via the body. ⁴⁶ Artworks, for Grosz, are compositions of sensations. However, and importantly, sensations are not formed in the artwork rather they are the ‘forming forces’ of the artwork. ⁴⁷ As Grosz explains:

Art is how the body senses most directly, with ironically, the least representational mediation, for art is of the body, for it is only art that draws the body into sensations never experienced before. ⁴⁸

Artworks are therefore not the representation, capture or narration of sensation, but rather they are that which transforms the body through the unfolding of sensation. Art enables the body to experience the universe’s material indeterminacy through sensation. Art doesn’t represent. It provokes, intensifies, resonates and excites.

Understood as a bloc of sensations which affect worlds and bodies, Grosz names art as the ‘indirect consequence’ of Charles Darwin’s concept of sexual selection. ⁴⁹ Unlike natural selection, which is concerned with the preservation of life, Grosz argues that sexual selection complicates and therefore risks life for the purpose of intensifying sensation. ⁵⁰ Whilst natural selection is driven by the need for survival, sexual selection is driven by the desire to experience pleasure. Through its orientation to pleasure, sexual selection powers the endless creation of difference. ⁵¹ Grosz writes the following on difference powered by sexual energies:

Sexual selection can be more explicitly linked to the arts than natural selection to the extent that it functions to highlight, to intensify, the bodies of both the living beings exciting through and the living beings excited by various forms of bodily display . . . ⁵²

Sexual selection is the artistic process through which all life becomes something else – it is a transformation of forces, a becoming-other of life. For Grosz, it is a process that links humans to their ‘animal preconditions’ – ‘the animal becomings that inform and direct human art production’. ⁵³ As part of the evolutionary process, sexual selection intensifies sensation and creates difference across all organic forms, including and beyond the human. Charged by sexual attraction and a desire for pleasure, the intensification of sensation also makes art. ⁵⁴ This Groszian approach unsettles the idea that pleasure is located exclusively in a gaze – a learned way of looking specific to the Western Art tradition – and its associated symbolism and figuration. Art understood through the lens of intensified sensation complicates ideas about pleasure within landscape art by drawing attention to the presence of affective more-than-human pleasures. Landscape art – like all the arts – becomes more than a representation. Pleasure becomes more than looking. Instead, pleasure transforms bodies through the evolution of the universe’s indeterminate forces.

Pleasure, for Grosz, is tied to the animal. ⁵⁵ Through sexual selection humans are no longer considered superior or separate from animals. ⁵⁶ Instead, human differentiation is understood as an ongoing consequence of an evolutionary process, of which art is an unintended effect. ⁵⁷ The capacity to produce art then runs throughout all living beings as Grosz explains:

art is of the animal. It comes, not from reason, recognition, intelligence, not from a uniquely human sensibility, or from any of man’s higher accomplishments, but from something excessive, unpredictable, lowly. ⁵⁸

Grosz considers the activities or properties of animals which are undertaken or exist for no particular purpose other than for an intensification of themselves as artistic (e.g. birdsong or the bright colours of fish scales) in the same way that human’s artistic endeavours are (such as painting or sculpture). ⁵⁹ Humans are no longer understood separate from the animal:

the animal becomes not that against which we define ourselves but that through which we come to our limits. We are animals of a particular sort which, like all of life, are in the process of becoming something else. ⁶⁰

This repositioning of the human is disruptive for creative geographies because it produces a new notion of art. Art is no longer a human accomplishment but instead an intensification of sensation driven by an ‘animal precondition’. All humans and nonhumans alike possess artistic capacity, problematising our typical understanding of art and artist. Grosz’s work then prompts us to reconsider the questions which we ask of the arts as cultural geographers. Our attention is turned from questions of who can be an artist? or how can one be an artist? to instead what makes life artistic? Asking a similar question herself, ‘Are animals artistic?’, Grosz offers cultural geographies an answer, ‘Certainly, if by that we understand that they intensify sensation’. ⁶¹ Sexual selection as an evolutionary process repositions the human with the animal, showing that all bodies have the ability to produce art – human or not. ⁶² I use such a repositioning of the human and reconceptualisation of art for my participatory landscape methodology, making it a process accessible for those without experience of painting.

More specifically, the premise on which my landscape painting methodology rests recognises the arts as the transformation of sensation through sexual selection. This process generates an intensity of affect capable of changing both body and cosmos – more specifically for this project, subject and landscape. Such an understanding of art makes this method accessible for those without experience in painting or drawing. Consequently, I position this method within a wealth of work in geography that illustrates the utility of arts processes as appropriate methods for projects with participatory aims. ⁶³ Additionally, as my methodology relies on the potential of sexual selection for attuning bodies to landscapes, I add a critical perspective on pleasure to geographical work which already demonstrates the potential of creative practice for researching landscapes. ⁶⁴

Step one: choosing my participants and a landscape

The term ‘participatory research’ can mean a range of things. For some, it means completely sharing ownership of their research with participants, including everything from the design of the project to analysis and publication. ⁶⁶ For others, it means the participants took a more active role in some but not all of these processes. ⁶⁷ By ‘participatory’, in this project I mean that my participants had an involved role in research collection, whilst I carried out all other aspects of the research project. I recognise how a more thorough engagement with my participants throughout the project would create an approach better suited to challenge the hierarchical nature of the research process – a primary aim of most participatory action research. ⁶⁸ However, this project grew from a theoretical interest in exploring the intersection of feminist thought, landscape and creative method in human geography, rather than a desire to navigate power relations throughout a research encounter. Originally, I set out to challenge some of the ways in which cultural geographers have usually explored landscape through art – such as landscape’s association with the Western Art canon, the picturesque, and the sublime. ⁶⁹ I wondered what it would mean for cultural geographies to consider how ordinary people paint a landscape ordinary to them. I hoped that neither mine or my participants’ lack of artistic knowledge would exclude us from taking part in an artistic exploration of landscape, and I thought Grosz’s work could help with such a concern. I also thought that through Grosz’s writing some of the elitism which stalks landscape might be unpicked and instead those not usually found in the genre might be welcomed in.

With these aims, I asked people I knew well if they’d paint a picture of our local high street. There was no requirement to have painted before, but if they had it also did not matter. Poppy, for example, had only ever painted at school. As was the case with all my participants, Poppy was chosen simply on the basis that she considered Darlington to be home. From Darlington myself, our high street – High Row – is the most prominent landscape I associate with our town. High Row offered an opportunity to explore a landscape which differed from the picturesque scenes often found in work on landscape art across cultural geographies. ⁷⁰ Reflective of the now broadened sense of the term found within more recent research, ⁷¹ High Row allowed a banal, ordinary, and familiar landscape to act as an important artistic scene.

When designing this painting method for this set of amateur artists, it became a delicate balance between two processes. Firstly, the creation of a coherent structure that ensured standardisation across the research process and that would yield relevant research material. And, secondly, leaving space for creative freedom so that participants could express their experiences of the landscape creatively on their own terms. The use of a how-to guide is the first indication of this evolving tension and points to my attempt to harness sexual selection for the purpose of knowledge production. The format of a how-to manual allows for other geographers to understand how they also might design a creative method oriented to the intensification of sensation and sexual selection. By using such a format, I outline a methodological experiment that infuses the practicalities of research technique with feminist thought.

Step two: the beginnings of intensification

To encourage Poppy to begin to see this familiar place as an artistic scene and to ease her into thinking about landscape creatively, we walked a circuit of the high street where she had the opportunity to photograph the landscape. Photography used for research in this way is most often referred to as photovoice. As a research methodology, it’s ability to provide research material from the participant’s perspective is well documented. ⁷² Leaning in to the capacity of photography to capture my participant’s experiences of the landscape, I left it to Poppy to choose how to use the camera without a discussion of photographic techniques or styles. Photography does have a long and complex past with landscape both within and beyond cultural geographies, ⁷³ where photographic techniques have often been understood as what Wylie would call ‘a set of visual strategies and devices for distancing and observing.’ ⁷⁴ Feminist geographies have even challenged the dominance of straight male desire in these ‘visual strategies’, showing how the subversion of symbolism can visualise feminist pleasures. However, when considering Poppy’s photography as a moment of sexual selection, ⁷⁵ photographic techniques became less important for capturing her own engagement with the landscape. Instead, intensified pleasure became the basis for Poppy creatively documenting her experiences.

Poppy’s photographs are the beginnings of intensification guided by sexual selection. ⁷⁶ They are a selection, complexification and transformation of qualities into sensations. The focus of her photographs are the town clock and market hall (see Figure 3), both gothic style buildings designed by renowned architect Alfred Waterhouse. The town clock would later become the focus of her painting. ⁷⁷ Looking at these photographs, it is obvious that Poppy does not understand what Nash calls ‘the landscape format’ – artistic conventions which can spatially organise landscapes – but here she doesn’t need to. Like other examples of photovoice which do not require expertise with photography, Poppy’s photos still capture her experiences of our town, and they do so through sexual selection. Her perspective is not captured in:

signifying relation, in which the material plane is understood as a chain of signifiers and the aesthetic plane is the field of the signified: rather, it is a relation of eruption and emergence. ⁷⁸

When Poppy focuses her lens on these particular landmarks there is an attunement of the body to landscape, and landscape to body, that draws the forces of the universe into something new. She is drawn to the landscape through an artistic process which gathers pleasurable aspects of the landscape into a becoming-other. However, the parameters of my research method – in terms of choosing the landscape and the photography exercise myself – do place certain limits on her ability to transform the landscape, herself and her artwork into sensation. There are boundaries placed on this sexual selection, meaning tensions arise when intensification is used a means to collect research material.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

High Row. Photos by Poppy.

Step three: the plane of composition

Poppy like most of my participants was not familiar with landscape painting. I thought it necessary then to give her some reference points to ease any anxieties about what her painting ‘should’ look like. I showed Poppy four different landscape paintings from British Modernist and Contemporary Art: Peter Lanyon’s (1951) ‘Porthleven’ as an illustration of experiential landscape painting; David Hockney’s (1980)

‘Outpost Drive, Hollywood’ as a representation of multiple perspective; Howard Hodgkin’s (2013–4) ‘Indian Waves’ as an example of nonfigurative art; and Paul Nash’s (1936–8) ‘Landscape from a Dream’ as an example of surrealism. These paintings were not intended to act as representations to be reproduced in Poppy’s own painting, but rather as creative prompts that might inspire participants who had not painted previously. For instance, the way Hodgkin’s uses intense colour to express emotional experience appears to influence Poppy’s own painting. By using bright red paints, she hoped to ‘provoke anger’ in those who view her painting (see Figure 3). Poppy did so because she felt angry about the declining state of our town for which she blamed local politicians. At the time of painting, Darlington Borough Council had ended several key services in the town because a shortfall of £12.5 million in the council’s finances. ⁷⁹ In Poppy’s work then the influence of Hodgkin’s style seems apparent in conveying her feelings about our town, especially in her anger at local politicians.

Despite Hodgkin’s influence in Poppy’s painting, these paintings were not meant to be reproduced representatively by my participants. Rather they acted as examples of what landscape paintings looked like for participants who were feeling unsure about what to do. In my mind, there was no right or wrong way for the participants to paint the high street. However, as most lacked familiarity with painting, there was some concern from participants that they would paint ‘correctly’. Reflecting on this project now 6 years later, I recognise that using all British male painters is a drawback of this method, as it exemplifies a form of landscape painting that isn’t rich in its diversity. In fact, British Modernist and Contemporary Artworks all possess certain visual aesthetic regimes, associated with particular conventions and techniques. However, I originally chose these artists as their artworks differ from the realist style of Renaissance landscape paintings examined traditionally in landscape studies, ⁸⁰ artworks which have a lingering perception as elitist, masculinist and representational in cultural geographies. ⁸¹

Despite the limitations of this particular selection of paintings, it is possible to conceptualise the paintings used here as primarily intensified sensations. When paintings is recognised as sensation, situating my participants’ paintings alongside these famous artworks is what Grosz would call an act of ‘framing’. ⁸² By which I mean it is a moment where forces are demarcated for their transformation into sensation. When painting Poppy works alongside a genealogy of artistic genres, all of which exist already on the plane of composition. The plane of composition is significant to Grosz’s ontology of art, which she describes as:

the field, the plane, of all artworks, all genres, all types of art, the totality of all the various forms of artistic production in no particular order or organization that which is indirectly addressed and transformed through each work of art. ⁸³

When Poppy borrows from Hodgkin, she is positioning her artwork onto the plane of composition. On the plane, indeterminate forces are given order and structure through art, and in relation to various artistic conventions, methods and techniques. Here, I borrow the plane of composition for the purposes of building this method, showing how these various steps exist simultaneously as a mode of research standardisation and as the framing of qualities for intensification of sensation. Through sensation-as-method then new tensions emerge in landscape – tensions between the processes of research collection and the freedom of creative expression, or the processes of sexual selection.

Step four: living sensations

As Poppy finally moves to painting, intensification is structured once more through my attempts to standardise creative method. On the high street, I set up an easel, stool and a small tripod from which I film a time-lapse of Poppy painting. I chose to film the painting process as others have illustrated the efficacy of video for exploring movement, the non-verbal and the bodily. In this way, the time-lapse extended my ability to analyse the affective processes of experience ⁸⁴ – for example, those moments where Poppy scribbles red crayon in a determined manner. To properly explore the affective, Simpson argues that video should be combined with other ‘fleshy’ methods. ⁸⁵ Hence, and comparably to the work of other creative geographers, the time-lapse, Poppy’s painting and my own notes combine to offer both painting process and finished artwork as research material. Poppy’s experience of the impacts of austerity on her hometown are expressed in the act of painting and her finished painting. In her artwork, forceful and deliberate brushstrokes depict Darlington’s town clock following over and smashing into the high street – a metaphor, Poppy explains, for the steady deterioration of the town centre.

These artworks, the embodied knowledges which they are productive of, and the methods which allow their collection, are all underpinned by a becoming-other of sensation. Sensation is ‘eternalised’ through art’s becoming-other. ⁸⁶ The framing of indeterminate forces – their movement elsewhere for artmaking – is the becoming inhuman of pleasure:

The sensations produced are not the sensations of a subject, but sensation in itself, sensations as eternal, as monument. ⁸⁷

The toppling clock tower is a transformation of the numerous forces of pressure exercised on the town – such as the pressures of neoliberal capital, increasing austerity and local/national policy issues – into living sensation. ⁸⁸ This transformation is guided by the animal urge to intensify qualities for pleasure. Poppy’s painting is then the overcoming of the animal. It is the transformation of herself, the landscape, and the relation between the two through sexual selection. Qualities are transformed into sensations that live beyond the original creative encounter, that can go on to affect and intensify others. Initially borne from an animal impulse, in Poppy’s painting sensations gain autonomy from the creative encounter itself. Nevertheless, they do so as the structures of my method place limits on their form.