MIXED MEDIA:MIXED MEDIA:
WHEN IS A
LANDSCAPE NOT
A LANDSCAPE?
WHEN IT’S PHOTOGRAPHED BY
DANIEL GUSTAV CRAMER
words BRIAN DILLON
IN 1714 THE IRISH PHILOSOPHER GEORGE BERKELEY crossed Mount
Cenis on horseback, and found the view distinctly unedifying
– he was, he later wrote, ‘put out of humour by the most horrible
precipices’. (Perhaps he consoled himself, in proper Idealist fashion,
by concluding that the hideous crags existed only at the instant that
he perceived them.) As Robert Macfarlane points out in Mountains
of the Mind (2003), his history of the modern obsession with uplands,
such a reaction was not unusual in an era when mountains had not
yet acquired sublime or picturesque significance. Wealthy travellers,
it is said, even had themselves blindfolded before being led over the
Alps, so as not to have to look at the monstrous peaks. Mountains
were in a sense invisible to the pre-Romantic imagination: they were
deserts of rock, vacant horrors before which the mind shrank.
But blanks have a habit of being filled in, and although
later aesthetic enthusiasts of altitude and ice may have affected
to value exactly this emptiness itself, they also wrestled with the
paradox of having to describe structures so novel and alien that they
could hardly be grasped. Consequently, in their accounts of them,
mountains always looked like something else; to the Romantic eye
they were oddly incapable of being themselves and so became bare
screens on which to project a prodigious array of metaphors. In part
the problem was their sheer strangeness: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
spoke of ‘the pleasure of seeing only totally new things’, but these
unprecedented wonders seem almost invariably to have been
translated into the language of the known. Mountains looked like
waves, glaciers like frozen oceans, clouds like floating boulders. It is
as if, above a certain height, the landscape only became visible at the
moment one mistook it for something else.
It would be naive at best to insinuate that the photographs
of Daniel Gustav Cramer exist in some direct – or, actually, even
ironised – relation to the Romantic art that first tried to frame the
edgeless atmosphere of this upper world. The briefest mental
flicker-book tally of the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich is
enough to dispel the comparison: Cramer quite disposes of the Untitled (Woodland), 2006 Untitled (Woodland), 2006
p102-104 Mixed Media AR Jul07.in102 102 8/6/07 09:24:04
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