“What if…painting rejected its semantic overlords with their familiar psychologies and their center-to-surround management policies, and, tuning in instead to the physicality and latent time of shifting ground matter and atmospheric conditions, opened itself to wandering?” What if, indeed! And what a surprise that painting should find a tribune to assert its rights over against the semantic, not from an artist, art historian, or critic, but from a scholar of modernist poetry, best known (at least to me) for his 2006 book Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie. And that the specific body of work through which he makes his case turns out to be seventeenth century Dutch landscape painting! Can you think of a less timely, less fashionable, dare I say less sexy field of research than that? With an outsider’s eye, Lytle Shaw makes it fresh. And although he’s clearly steeped himself in the relevant historical as well as art-historical literature, and even sneaks in the occasional side reference to Robert Smithson or William Carlos Williams, Francis Ponge or Lyn Hejinian, the freshness comes from fresh looking—an immersion in the physicality of paintings by Jan van Goyen, Jacob van Ruisdael, Meindert Hobbema and others. In fact, my one issue with the book is that its compact paperback format has not allowed for big enough, detailed enough reproductions to confirm Shaw’s often minute descriptions of the paintings’ physical evocations. I’m out of the city as I write this, but I wish I could pop over to the Met and verify his description of the ground plane of van Goyen’s 1647 View of the Hague from the Northwest: “Here, the band of repoussoir is so dark that it creates an ambiguity about where the painting begins. It is as if part of the varnished frame has begun to decompose and spread down into the painting, merging with the murky mud in the foreground” and “small flecks of partially lit matter (ground) make their way into this zone, increasing its ambiguity.” Shaw’s enthusiastic evocations of the muck and mire, waste and welter—the dank materiality—of such painting can put me more in mind of Jean Dubuffet than of anything I recall of the Golden Age landscapes I’ve, admittedly rather idly, observed in museums over the years. But that’s what I like about this book: it gets me wondering (the mental equivalent of wandering). And it makes me remember how to see familiar things that I haven’t paid much attention to, and see them differently, find them far more interesting than I’d ever realized. In this case, changes how I see this genre of painting by pointing out something that ought to be glaringly obvious but that I’ve never considered: that landscape painting meant something different in Holland than anywhere else in Europe because that was the one place where the ground was not a reliable substratum, either materially or, perhaps, metaphysically. It was not something stable that could be built upon, but was to a great extent a product of human effort, an artifact, and, more importantly, always fragile and in need of upkeep. As a result, Shaw explains, “the best Dutch landscape painters treated ground matter as something other than a previously unruly swirl of sand and sea water that either had been, or would soon be, masterfully, heroically, and finally sorted.” Suddenly, that boring old Dutch landscape painting looks like an art for an age when human dominion over nature has become an unconvincing story and we must more humbly learn how to maintain what affords survival on shaky ground.
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Lytle Shaw, New Grounds for Dutch Landscape, is published by OEI editör, 2021.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.