David Hockney is undoubtedly one of the most important of contemporary artists; all the more so because, like that other contemporary great, Gerhardt Richter, he hasn’t been seduced into the ever increasingly ridiculous nonsense that goes under the rubric of contemporary ‘conceptual art’.  His latest exhibit at the Royal Academy in London is focused on one of the most traditional of subjects – the landscape.

Since its origins in Rome in the 17th century, landscape painting has both reflected and influenced Man’s relationship with the land. Since the romantic period, not much has changed in landscape painting. The landscape is romanticized and presented as a fetish object to be held in awe – a perspective that later paralleled the rise of the conversion of natural landscape to consumer product through the creation of national parks. Turner was possibly the only landscape painter to provide a different perspective – the landscape as atmosphere rather than object.

The romantic view of the landscape as fetish object continues to be carried through in contemporary nature photography of the type that populates the National Geographic magazine and other similar outlets. John Stezaker’s work comments on this view of nature.

In these days of concern with our environment and the preservation of natural spaces, a fair amount of contemporary art portrays Man as the invader and destroyer of a nature that would remain as this romantically beautiful object if only we would leave it alone.

It is in this context – and the context of landscape painting nowadays being largely seen as a spent art form – that Hockney’s work needs to be judged. And it emerges victorious.

After four centuries of landscape painting, one would have thought that there remains little to say. Yet Hockney manages to give us a totally different feel for the landscape in these images. Here the landscape is presented as a joyful motif. The bright colours (a kind of return to Fauvism – though not quite), the almost naif approach to some of the work, the general atmosphere that is created – all of these generate a sensation of fun and joy. Hockney draws no difference between so-called unspoilt landscape – or wilderness – and agricultural countryside. Both are to be celebrated. Hockney moves away from the trend to excluding any form of human influence from landscape representation – a trend that continues to perpetuate the fiction of a wilderness to be preserved untouched.

In these works the landscape is no longer that remote object to be fetishized and held in awe. Unlike so much of contemporary environmental art, guilt at being human and living our lives is no longer the emotion we are expected to feel when looking at the Hockney landscape. With these images we feel uplifted with sheer delight, enjoyment and a sense of fun – all Hockney trademarks represented with particular exuberance in this body of work. All of this creates a different and more positive human relationship with the landscape – one built on joie de vivre and which may lend itself better to building interest and support for addressing environmental questions.

One final point about this body of work. Some of the ‘paintings’ (including the two shown here) were created on an iPad – rapidly becoming one of Hockney’s favourite tools. In doing so, Hockney combines modern technology with his celebration of nature and the landscape – again a refreshing change from the dichotomous battle between nature and modern progress that is all too often set up by the environmental community.

Slide show of images of the exhibit

One review of the exhibit.

But, of course, not everyone likes this work.

David Buckland: The Great White Sale. These images are made in a short window of time when the power of the video projector matches the light of dawn, when there is both message and ice. This fleeting moment of human excess is so short, two hundred years, but for the glacier it is barely a single breath taken.

Cape Farewell has already organized a number of art exhibitions as a result of the works created during the expeditions. The latest traveling exhibit – u-n-f-o-l-d opens in Chicago on March 16th. According to David Buckland, “We intend to communicate through art works our understanding of the changing climate on a human scale, so that our individual lives can have meaning in what is a global problem.”

This blog has reviewed the work of a number of artists that have collaborated with Cape Farewell. These include Lemn Sissay, Iain McEwan, and Lucy + Jorge Orta. Buckland also curated the highly successful EARTH exhibit at the Royal Academy in 2009.

Adriane Colburn: Forest for the Trees is a meditation on the complex relationship between nature and industry; sustained land vs. commodified land; matter on the surface of the earth vs. the matter below ground; the morphing of the forest into an industrial landscape; and the fine lines between use and exploitation.

Cape Farewell is probably the most important undertaking to date that, in an organized and concerted way, engages the arts in issues of climate change and the environment.

The exhibit “sets out to consider the impact of climate change, and our transition to a new world, on the practice of a broad range of contemporary artists, working in a wide-variety of media.”  It is encouraging that an institution like the Royal Academy has chosen to address environmental issues in a major exhibit and that it has showcased the work of so many contemporary artists addressing these issues. Chris Jordan and Edward Burtynsky were two of the artists featured in the exhibit.

However, for me, Lemn Sissay’s poem performed on video was one of the more powerful works in the exhibit.

You can view the video here and the text of the poem is reproduced below.

A lost number in the equation
A simple, understandable miscalculation
And what if on the basis of that
The world as we know it changed its matter of fact

Let me get it right. What if we got it wrong?
What if we weakened ourselves getting strong?
What if we found in the ground a file of proof?
What if the foundations missed a vital truth?
What if the industrial dream sold us out from within?
What if our unpunishable defense sealed us in?
What if our wanted more was making less?
And what if all of this wasn’t progress?

Let me get it right. What if we got it wrong?
What if we weakened ourselves getting strong?
What if our wanting more was making less?
And what if all of this wasn’t progress?
What if the disappearing rivers of Eritrea,
the rising tides and encroaching fear
What if the tear inside the protective skin
of Earth was trying to tell us something?

Let me get it right. What if we got it wrong?
What if we weakened ourselves getting strong?
What if the message carried in the wind was saying something?
From butterfly wings to the hurricane
It’s the small things that make great change
In the question towards the end of the leases
no longer the origin but the end of species

Let me get it right. What if we got it wrong?
What if the message carried in the wind was saying something?