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7/5/2013

Cyclorama

Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City

Salvatore Arancio, Elena Damiani, Haris Epaminonda, Cyprien Gaillard and Matts Leiderstam

Curator Andrea Torreblanca
Assistant Curator Ximena Amescua

Cyclorama explores the concept of the gaze through landscape, a theme that has been frequently represented, politicized and the subject of interventions over the centuries.

In its historical construction, the landscape that was once regarded as a social space, later became an aesthetic category that specialists have recently associated to colonialism, imperial expansion and the industrial era. This exhibition takes as its point of departure the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period when our way of seeing became transformed at a time when modern machines were taking over from the pre-industrial economy, scientists were naming new species, travelers were domesticating exotic landscapes, and geological studies were disproving biblical theories about how the Earth was formed.

In 1787, the Irish painter Robert Barker invented a circular building that contained a monumental painting of a landscape to be viewed as a spectacle. The popularity of the new panorama/ cyclorama—described by Barker as “nature at a glance”—soon revealed not only a growing interest in the landscape but also how people’s gaze had altered with the advent of modernity.

For this exhibition, the artists Salvatore Arancio, Elena Damiani, Haris Epaminonda, Cyprien Gaillard and Matts Leiderstam have adopted a common strategy: the appropriation of the past. By copying classical paintings, manipulating old engravings, making collages of photographs and quotes, historical allusions and references, the five artists focus on showing what the images reveal to us today, and how the gaze approximates to the past from a contemporary discourse. As a result, their work confronts us simultaneously with images that evoke the landscape from its beginnings as a genre (in the seventeenth century) until the deconstruction of a post-modern, abstract and timeless landscape in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The works also allude to the ‘museum gaze’ and the landscape: from the classification of nature in sixteenth- century cabinets of curiosities, the prominence given to classical landscapes by museums, the contradiction of inserting a physical landscape within a white cube, and finally the exhibition design strategies that have shaped the perception of the spectator.

In Cyclorama, visitors will randomly encounter elements of the sublime and the picturesque, the romantic and the political, the scientific and the poetical, even theoretical and non-material representation of landscape. From these varied angles, the construction of the landscape reveals the myriad ways in which this European vision has formed our perception of the world around us.

THE ENLIGHTENED LANDSCAPE From the seventeenth until the early-nineteenth century, a form of enlightened tourism became popular among the European upper classes who were finishing their education. The young bourgeoisie, often accompanied by a guide, would travel through Europe, visiting Italy and France in particular, to learn from private art collections, classical ruins and select landscapes. This so-called ‘Grand Tour’ became one of the precursors to modern tourism. Journeys could take several years and were generally recorded in anecdotes, paintings and illustrations which later developed into popular guides and travel books. Many artists went in search of landscapes categorized as sublime and picturesque that were widely known about at the time.

Matts Leiderstam refers to this journey to reflect on the ‘gaze’ in relation to the landscape. But rather than simply narrate the Grand Tour, the artist shifts the discourse towards three particular areas of interest. Firstly, he copies certain classical museum paintings in order to “learn to see again” through painting, and adjusting various details, Leiderstam questions both the provenance and the concept of authorship in art. Secondly, he inserts these landscapes within the Romantic ideal, making the English garden a place of seduction and exchanges of homoerotic glances. And finally, he incorporates optical devices such as Claude Glasses, telescopes and magnifying glasses to see both his copies as well as the real landscapes that form part of the exhibition context (in this case he includes works by José María Velasco, August Löhr and Conrad Wise Chapman) in order to show that our gaze has always been mediated by criteria such as those laid down by museums.

THE MYTHOLOGY OF LANDSCAPE In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, geology was a science that explained the formation of the Earth and was used as a metaphor in Romantic poetry; it also attracted tourism and boosted industrial development. Geologists were beginning to disprove Biblical myths about the origin of the mountains, rocks and volcanoes. Nevertheless, myths often remained the only explanation available for certain natural phenomena, something referred to as “geomythology” by the geologist Dorothy Vitaliano.

Salvatore Arancio is inspired by myths about the Earth’s origins. Some of his works arise from the manipulation of old illustrations of erupting volcanoes, remote landscapes and strange rock formations, with titles taken from geology books. The artist is also interested how flora and fauna began to be classified in cabinets of curiosities during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, thus referring to the myths created by these same specimens.

AESTHETIC GEOLOGY
Geology and poetry became closely intertwined during the Romantic period. The professor Noah Heringman defines “aesthetic geology” as the space between literature and geology, in which analogies between one and the other (the eruption of a volcano as an allegory of the French Revolution; climbing a mountain as a form of progress; or rocks as a metaphor of time) were not only common but also reveal a period in which aesthetics was suffering a crisis of representation and geology was changing modern philosophical thought.

Elena Damiani makes precise incisions in maps and archive documents which she displays next to marble sculptures from which black and white landscapes emerge. The artist is interested in the spaces in between the materials (marble and silk fabrics) and the images which she appropriates in her work, confronting the spectator with their own history and temporality. Therefore her images appear through fragments, glazings, and cuttings, making viewers both mediators and translators of their own experience.

THE ARCHEOLOGY OF THE SUBLIME
The ‘sublime’, an aesthetic term used in Classical times, underwent a strong revival in the Romantic period. ‘Terrifying beauty’ was a common description for the forceful impact of certain natural phenomena: majestic landscapes, storms, volcano eruptions and maritime scenes. In the second half of the twentieth century the sublime once again began to influence artists, specifically those belonging to the Land Art movement, such as Robert Smithson, who favored a direct confrontation with the landscape rather than representation.

The work of Cyprien Gaillard is a gesture towards various aspects of the sublime, close to the work of Romantic artists as well as the work of Robert Smithson, however, his strategy is inspired by the idea of vandalism and ruin. He is drawn to these relationships as a means of talking about the irreversibility of the passing of time (entropy) and the representation of landscape. His video Real Remnants of Fictive Wars II (2004) places the viewer in the center of a railway tunnel surrounded by a rural landscape; the image is slowly covered by a cloud of smoke which eventually whites out the screen before clearing to reveal the image once again. In his series New Picturesque (2012) Gaillard removes most of the images from postcards to leave them almost completely white, thus questioning the idea of the picturesque, which was understood as being “worthy of being represented” in the Romantic period.

THE MUSEUM GAZE
From its origins, the museum became an encyclopedia that represented the world through fragments from ruins, pieces of architecture and other objects that were both astonishing and produced knowledge about other cultures. In the words of historian Paula Findlen: “Museums were fabricated out of the emerging dialectic between authority and curiosity, reverence for the wisdom of the past and excitement about the possibilities of the present.” As a result, the museum has been one of the places that has shaped our gaze.

Haris Epaminonda has an interest in the history of images and their ability to evoke multiple readings. The artist devises a route for the spectator which refers to how the museum can isolate, frame and represent images or objects that predispose our understanding about things, in the same way as books and encyclopedias do. By representing the landscape through abstraction and monochromes, Epaminonda deconstructs a predefined discourse so that spectators can make their own readings about the notion of landscape.

Communications
Sofía Provencio - Beatriz Cortés T. (5255) 5286 6519 prensa@museotamayo.org

Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo
Paseo de la Reforma 51, Bosque de Chapultepec Del. Miguel Hidalgo C.P. 11580. México, D.F.
Hours:
Tuesday through Sunday, 10 am to 6 pm
Price: $19 / General public
Entrance is free to students, teachers, and senior citizens with valid identification
Sunday free to public

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