It is helpful to realize that feeling as though glamour is elsewhere has always been present, including in places where now, thanks to art, we have no problem identifying some value. We have been taught that we shouldn't necessarily blame the places we're in; rather, we should be aware that we damn them because artists have not yet opened our eyes to them. For example, mountains, which we arc used to assuming are inherently attractive, seem so to our eyes largely as a result of lengthy efforts by artists.
In 1844, the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson published an essay called The Poet', in which he complained about the traditional tendency, in poetry and painting, to find beauty mainly in rural landscapes and unspoilt, tranquil nature. As the Industrial Revolution took hold, Emerson lamented the attitude of nostalgic poets who turned away from the increasingly common sight of railways, factories, canals, warehouses and cranes in disgust and saw them merely as visual intrusions that spoil the world. By contrast, he says, 'the true poet sees them fall within the great order of nature not less than the beehive or the spider's geometrical web. Nature adopts them very fast into her vital circles, and the gliding train of cars she loves like her own.' He encourages us to approach such things without prejudice, without looking only for confirmation of our current habits of perception, and to make room in our souls for the recognition of alternative forms of beauty.
The Sense of What is Beautiful
Learning to see beauty here too.
88. Bcrnd and Hilla Bcchcr, Water Towers. 1980
The challenge for modern artists is to open our eyes to the charms of modern landscapes, which means, predominantly, landscapes marked by technology and industry. The first impulse is to protest that there can be nothing beautiful in water towers, motorways or shipyards - but how wrong we would be to remain stuck there. Artists, who were once at the forefront of helping us to appreciate unsullied sublime nature, have taken a lead in guiding us to the unusual beauty of the landscapes of modernity.
The leading proponents of this have been two married photographers who spent most of their adult lives teaching at the influential Kunstakademie in Diisseldorf. Bernd and Hilla Becher devoted their creative energies to producing beautiful, spare images (they only ever shot on overcast days, so as to remove any shadows) of bits of the industrial landscape no one had previously paid much attention to (88). The titles of their books capture their incongruously technical interests: Water Towers, Blast Furnaces, Pennsylvania Coat Mine Tipples, Gas Tanks, Industrial Facades, Minebeads, Industrial Landscapes, Basic Forms of Industrial Buildings, Cooling Towers and Grain Elevators. After several decades of neglect, their work eventually caught on. They acquired a gallery in New York, the Museum of Modern Art picked up some of their work, and they arc now firmly in the pantheon of fashionable artists of the twentieth century. Their pupils at the Kunstakademie (Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff. Thomas Struth, Candida Hofer and Elger Esser) have taken their message even further. Thanks to this group, it now seems utterly normal - which it wasn't at all in 1950 - to pause before a water tower and comment on its beauty.
Andreas Gursky s image of Salerno invites us to share his experience of the harbour as a place of deep fascination and unexpected beauty (89). We are so negligent of such places that it is surprising just to encounter a photograph of a port in an art gallery. We rarely wonder where goods have come from, or how they arrived in our lives - unless, occasionally, a small-print reference to the town of Shenzhen in the province of Guangdong on a packet of mints, or a 'Made in Ecuador' label on a new pair of socks, suggests a history more intriguing, grander and more mysterious than hitherto suspected. Gursky knows how to home in on such hints.
The great doors of a cargo ship open: within it are a thousand medium- sized family cars, at present all perfect and alike, but time will give each one a unique identity. Some will be places of carnage and tragedy; others will be mobile concert halls; one will witness a passionate scene of reconciliation in which, after years of awkward distance, a couple tell each other of the mutual love and sorrow; in another, a child will munch a sandwich on the way to the tennis match that will set her on a path to sporting glory. Massed like this, one sees the astonishing abundance and creative energy of our times.
The beauty of industry.
89. Andrea» Gur>ky. Salerno. 1990
The crates hold the unsung additives that make our lives better in so many tiny ways: polyols, which keeps toothpaste fluid; citric acid, which stops detergents decomposing; isoglucose, which makes cereal sweeter: glyceryl tristearate, which helps make soap; and xanthan gum, which stabilizes gravy and stops it getting lumpy. When we think of economics, we usually think of numbers: the GDP is expanding, employment is falling. How little we know of the processes that lie behind it - the supply chains, the chemistry, the mechanics - or the ports we can visit in the educative company of Andreas Gursky.
Throughout the history of art, artists have seen it as their task to represent their experience of nature. This has often taken the form of creating an image of some part of the natural world that has especially moved them. Diirer, for example, went to immense trouble, and deployed great technical skill, to reproduce the visual details of stalks and leaves (90).
One of the most welcome and interesting developments of twentieth century art has been the broadening of our understanding of the term 'artist'. Artists aren't necessarily people who show us a work that represents nature, or anything else for that matter. They might also be people who create opportunities for you to see nature - or anything else - directly in a more immediate or meaningful way. This is an evolution, not a rejection, of Diirer s ambition. For Diirer hoped that, having looked at his work, one would head outside and do what he had originally done: to look with great care and devotion at some significant aspect of the natural world.
Inking the trouble to took properly.
90. Albrcchi Durcr.
The targe Piece of Turf. 1503
In this new way, the artist becomes the choreographer of an experience you might have, rather than a recorder of an experience they once had. We are still digesting the full implications of this interesting epochal shift, which moves artists away from the studio and the easel and gives them things in common with business leaders, politicians, religious figures, architects, town planners and circus managers.
The main proponent of this new approach is the American artist James Turrell. At first sight, an image of his work appears to show an oval painting of the sky, set in a very dark grey frame of the same shape. What we are actually seeing is an opening in the roof of a specially designed observation chamber. Gradually, the fringe of cloud will expand and drift across the aperture; the light will fade. Rain might even fall. But the concern is not only with what we see. Around the edge of the chamber there is a simple stone bench; the idea is to have a group of people in there together, each one looking upwards towards the sky. The search is for a profound individual experience, but one that others are also having. In this way, the chamber is like a church, in which it is important that there is a community experience, although one which is transcendent in character. The place invites silence, patience and awe. It feels wrong to stay only for a moment, to gossip or have mean-spirited thoughts about other people.