| Magnetic & Magmatic Ambivalent Landscapes Isabella Guaitoli July 1998  • Intro • Environment dressing • Ambivalent Landscapes |
At this particular moment in history, charged as it is with the myriad stimuli and meaningsassociated with the symbolic passage into a new millennium, an open door to a future that is just around the corner, the vital dimensions of space and time seem to be condensing, catalysed by a magnetic, complex and very difficult to decipher present. These vital dimensions are constantly being re-elaborated by man in an attempt to concentrate all the experience of the past and all the expectations for the future in the "here and now".
In an increasingly chaotic world, highly globalized, but hyper-personalised and local at the same time, the individual often suffers from a profound sense of alienation, no longer able to recognise his surroundings, a stranger who has lost his bearings and all familiar points of reference.
A pronounced trend toward simplification in the field of communication and expression is evident in the frequent recourse being made to the inherent power of geographic places, their ability to express the interior and exterior dimensions of life on both the individual and group level.
The landscape is thus used as a visual and aesthetic metaphor and is coming back into vogue in terms of various modes of expression.
In terms of one approach, the landscape has been literally transformed into a visual narration, a stratification of signs from which stories emerge that are capable of evoking the past of both mankind and the entire planet, dense with memories and meanings. In this case the landscape is primarily a natural, ancestral place which by means of a direct link with the native cultures portrays a primitive, aboriginal reality that is much simpler, because free of all the complications man himself has created and surrounded himself with over the course of the evolutionary process.
According to this perspective and interpretation, the landscape constitutes a means for overcoming alienation, a way of rediscovering the security and roots that will provide a sense of identity.
Along with this more traditional interpretation, there coexists a second modality by which the landscape itself is employed as the expressive vehicle of the alienation, serving as the vague, indefinite background for the subject of the communication, an important setting due to this very lack of definition. In this case it is generally the urban scenario that predominates and, especially the depiction of spaces in which the people occupying them are unable to read/decipher anything, neither in terms of their own personal identity nor that of the society as a whole. These landscapes are non-places, as defined by the French anthropologist, Marc Augé in his book by the same name and the successive one, entitled, L’impossible voyage. Le tourisme et ses images (Disneyland and other non-places): highway intersections, hyper-markets, stock depots, airport parking facilities. Places with neither memory nor traces of the past, without form for the future and, for this reason, condemned to express the desolation and sense of alienation of contemporary man when faced with what is happening to his world.
The anonymous suburbs of the great cities, each one uglier that the next, are, as a matter of fact, expanding and ,to an increasing degree, they constitute the habitual stomping ground of the new generation. Moreover, the process of globalization is increasingly having a growing levelling affect on the environment, eliminating the peculiarities that once characterised various zones, standardising everything, obliterating distinctions.
The ambivalence of the "landscape form of expression" therefore consists in its being used in communication as both a raw, unadorned expression of contemporary alienation and the very opposite, namely, a potential remedy for this grim situation.
When the landscape included in a communication project has the properties of a "storytelling landscape", it is the version that is made up of places that have the capacity to transmit their poetic dimension to the people observing them, or which narrate by means of their profiles a story of the past that links them with a profound bond to human civilisation. This story, however, has not deprived them of their magnetic power, instead it invests them with rich symbolic value. All of these places stimulate emotions, thoughts and reflections that make them vehicles for both introspection and exploration for the viewer.
In the field of music, the Icelandic singer, Bjork, has managed to somehow fuse her half lyrical, half modern sound with the almost lunar landscape of her native land, portraying, in the video of the song, Joga, from her latest album, Homogenic, how a natural landscape can "open itself up" to vouchsafe a glimpse into the inner depths of its inhabitant, becoming, in the words of the song-writer herself, a metaphor for "emotional landscapes".
Antonio Biasiucci, an Italian artist, has been pondering the mysteries of nature for years and the exhibit (in Paris through Feb. 1999) that featured ten years of his photographic work focusing on volcanoes, bears witness to his capacity to reinterpret the environment in a very personal way: his landscapes are not
distinct, finite places, but rather overturned perspectives, in which the sky and earth become scrambled and confused and the total absence of human figures only serves to further reinforce the primordial magic which emanates from his works.
Many photography exhibits and art works are focusing on the theme of solitary and magnetic landscapes, scenes that have an almost hypnotic affect on the observer. In the work, Deserts (displayed at Video Forum, Bologna January/February 1999) by New York video artist, Bill Viola, one can clearly read the emotions and the great questions that well up in man when faced with the vastness of nature.
Frequently, there are no people in the images, which feature, instead a sort of self-referential beauty, to admire in its grandiosity, and with which one is free to establish a form of personal contact. In these artistic expressions the city is shown along with nature, because the urban landscape can be quite "natural" in its own way, too. In the exhibit entitled Paesaggio Endogeno (Endogenous Landscape), Italian artist, Luca Pancrazzi, invites the gallery visitor to immerse himself in the works of art, depictions of industrial and technological landscapes, as well as distinctly rustic countrysides, achieved by means of a different expressive techniques, from painting and sculpture to videos and installations, constantly referring back to visual stimuli.
The monochromatic device helps convey the depth of the places portrayed, becoming an expressive mode that is frequently preferred over colour, as in the case of the monochrome works of the famous French artist, Nathalie Du Pasquier, in which, although strewn with fascinating totems and ruins, the landscape itself remains the real protagonist.
The ambivalent landscapes also lend themselves to a type of advertising that plays on essential values: natural beauty is thus compared with inner beauty. The most recent press campaign by Lacoste places the subject into a breathtakingly beautiful, very stirring landscape, showing, for example, a violinist playing while immersed in a rocky scenario, or a young man alone in a canoe in the middle of some lake, staring toward the distant mountains on the horizon. In both cases the depth of the location is highlighted and brought out by the use of black and white, while the claim underscores the link between the person and the landscape: "Deviens ce que tu es" (become what you are). Only the logo shown at the bottom of the page recalls the presence of the product, suggesting to us, as our attention remains transfixed by the beauty of the scene, in a very subtle manner that it’s the manufacturer who acts as intermediary between man and nature.
The landscape as a substratum upon which man and history leave traces of their passage, is also included in this expressive context, enriching it by a level, shifting man’s role from that of a passive spectator of the landscape to one of its constituent components.
Of the many stratified signs and markings in the landscape, contemporary artistic research takes man's tracks, his traces, his prints, and interprets them as a voluntary-involuntary signal on the part of the person who left them. The particular physiognomy of the ground can freeze and preserve for millions of years the trails of living beings, in the same way that an artistic "hallmark" can be imprinted in a work of art and leave the trace of its author. The exhibition Identità impronte apparizioni (Identity, prints, apparitions), promoted in December ‘98 by the Culture Department of the Casale Monferrato town council, set out to collect uses that have been made of the print, starting from the human prints, of the hand or finger.
In this case, as well, advertising manages to take advantage of ideas borrowed from the realms of art and culture, reinterpreting them in a simpler, more direct manner, but always striving to preserve their intrinsic poetic quality. The press campaign for Roberto Del Carlo shoes is striking for its effectiveness and the extremely essential way it depicts two flat very images against a white background: one of a shoe, the other of it imprint in the sand, slightly wind-blown, which instantly recalls an imaginary desert.
But the interpretation of the landscape as a remedy for overcoming contemporary man’s alienation is being even further expanded, making it possible to take advantage of its values and hidden references even in the absence of its typical characteristics of vastness and naturalness, by simply suggesting it in terms of details capable of opening the doors of the observer’s memory to a world where everything is taken for granted. In this case one makes reference to the landscape as the natural habitat of native populations, of the primitive tribes whose lives are led in strict accordance with the natural rhythms of the land. All it takes is the gnarled hand of a simple pastor spinning wool to evoke the wide open spaces of the Asian steppe lands, as depicted in the press campaign for the spring/summer 1999 collection by Aida Barni, or a crude wooden container inside which is found a modern pair of shoes, to remind us of the world of African tribes, as has been done in the Ferragamo press campaign.
The sophisticated nuances of value involved in the way the landscape concept is utilised as a form of expression are infinite, but among the many, one should not forget the most frequently exploited example: the landscape as a place to explore and cross.
In this case, the perception of the landscape is not limited to a purely interior, mental experience. There arises a distinct need to actually physically experience the landscape, to explore it at one’s own pace, according to one’s own vital rhythms, in harmony with one’s soul.
Great travellers like Chatwin mark their progress through pictures and photographs which become a representation of their conception of life. Ordinary people too, however, who lead for the most part sedentary lives, are attracted by magnetic places and by extreme natural localities, very different from the usual tourist destinations. The deserts in particular, whose vastness and immobility obliges them to live at a different pace from the rest of the world, draw people who want to make new spiritual and meditative types of journeys, certainly not for purposes of escape.
In the field of advertising this need translates into media campaigns in which the products being promoted, usually cars and tourist vacation packages, are presented as intermediaries between man and nature, as facilitators in the highly meaningful/desirable relationship that is to be established between the two. There is no shortage of examples here: the press campaign for the Espace 98 automobile by Renault, where we see Moai in the background, those enormous, mysterious sculptures found on Easter Island; the ad for the Saab 9-3, in which the car is shown in an incredibly beautiful landscape in a black and white photograph that underscores the complimentary relationship between the subject and the background; the ad for the Spanish Seat Alhambra, with the awe-inspiring canyons of the American Southwest in the background; and the ad for the Grand Cherokee Jeep, set in a natural wilderness landscape, plus many, many more. This type of interpretation happens to have been used a lot. It is based on the idea that more and more people are going to feel the need for products and services that allow them to live their lives with a sense of freedom, which includes enjoying natural environments. It should therefore come as no surprise that landscapes appear in the media campaigns promoting cellular telephones (Iridium hand-held/palm-top satellite telephones) or financial services (Zurich Financial services).
Shifting the perception of landscape from a remedy for alienation to an approach in which it becomes the very expression of alienation involves a complete turnabout in terms of visual and value-related frames of reference: the vast natural panoramas make way for dreary industrial suburbs and anonymous metropolitan scenarios. The rich stratification of signs disappears, as the symbolic fertility of the place makes way for the complete vacuity and sterility of the non-place. The landscape serves to mirror the feeling of alienation in the face of current changes and the human being inserted into this scenario finds himself alone and abandoned due to the complete lack of any points of reference.
In this case the advertising industry has not yet completely exploited the potential of this theme, due to the fact that it embodies an awareness that is still too new and modern and also because it’s simply too difficult to apply this sort of thing effectively in the commercial field.
There are, however, some successful examples of this grim conception of the landscape being applied to advertising, as in the case of Caterpillar, who places the subject of the press campaign for its CAT brand of shoes in various anonymous locations: an eerie service station in the middle of nowhere; a highway intersection still under construction, both places completely barren of human life. Another, albeit much less hard-hitting, example of this phenomenon would be Kenzo’s press campaign which also includes a person in the landscape: actually the featured setting, sometimes bucolic, sometimes urban, is always realistic and dark and frankly not terribly striking due to its conspicuous normalcy.
In the case of Max&Co., the slight hint of the alienation theme is different because it plays primarily on the incongruity between the two featured young women, dressed in casual clothing, and the context, that back of an enormous factory that takes up the whole picture. Without resorting to god-forsaken landscapes, this press campaign still effectively manages to arouse a sense of disorientation and curiosity in the observer.
Beyond all the specific possible interpretations and all the expressive modalities, there is clear evidence of an increase in the value-related aspect of the landscape theme, which from a secondary background consideration is assuming a primary role - sometimes taking centre stage as the featured element - drawing attention to the spatial dimension of the communication, previously given short shrift compared with the temporal aspect or merely assigned a purely decorative scenic function.
The strong point of the landscape, or in more general terms, the "place/context/setting", is its capacity to adapt to man’s needs and serve as a collector of memories, slowly transformed into amplifiers of inner emotions and feelings.
A metaphor used by Borges turns out to be perfect for expressing this concept: "A man sets himself the task of drawing the world.
Over the years he fills his home with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, fish, homes, buildings, tools, stars, horses and people. Shortly before dying, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of accumulated lines traces the contours of his own face."
Naturally, this trend is more conspicuous in artistic expressions than other contexts of communication concerned with commercial objectives. The work of photographers is the most direct example, but books like Microcosms by Claudio Magris and Non-places by Marc Augé also render the idea of the attention the subject is catalysing. The cinema is another sector which is drawing inspiration from this area.
This year’s Quinzaine des Réalisateurs, the other film Review held parallel to the official version in Cannes film festival, provided numerous examples of work in which the environment/setting played a crucial role, although with a variety of meanings. The tormented The War Zone by Tim Roth, an actor trying his hand for the first time at directing, has the spectator experience the drama of the story’s characters by immersing him in a beautiful, yet accursed English landscape, the visual metaphor for their feelings and moods, a setting distinguished by an abandoned military bunker and the blue tones of the sea and the dark storming sky whose gloom dominate all other colours.
Also, in the case of Fever, a psychological thriller by American director, Alex Winter, one can speak of a sort of "soul landscape" phenomenon, but here the dark urban scenes and dingy squalid interiors have all been completely distorted by the perceptions and altered emotional states of the leading character.
In Scenery, on the other hand, by Chinese director, Zhao Jisong, the landscape that surrounds the characters can to a certain extent be explained in terms of the non-place concept and the alienation phenomenon that has been referred to. The film proceeds at a very slow pace with a completely Oriental rhythm, emphasising the landscape over the plot and even the leading characters, an anonymous landscape composed of dingy, squalid suburban slums where only a handful of characters move about in a gloomy atmosphere of unrelenting, all-pervasive penumbra. In Sud, a film in the form of a documentary by director, Chantal Akerman, the audience is presented with a neo-realistic setting. The director utilises a very objective, almost positivist approach to portray the difficult lot of black Americans. From the perspective of a car travelling through the landscape, the viewer observes what happens and what does not happen on the outside: the life of the people in real time, exactly as if he were present in those places.
» Ambivalent Landscapes by Isabella Guaitoli, July 1998
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