Perambulating, Wandering, Fleeing. A Few Notes on Mobile Landscapes

Andreas Rutkauskas’s photographic production is undeniably geographic; it covers a wide spectrum of landscape. And because it touches on or explores various aspects of the territory, it can also seem a little scattered. Yet I believe this artist’s work is entirely focused on traversals, motion, movement — eminently contemporary phenomena — as each of his photographic series broaches these themes from a particular angle. Rutkauskas’s work, finally, deals essentially with landscapes of mobility, of which it reveals various facets. Here I will attempt to explore some of the perspectives on landscape opened up by his practice. At first glance, nothing could be more still, or frozen, than a photograph; and landscape, though it may undergo transformations, obviously cannot move. Yet photography and landscape may well be the most mobile of mediums. Landscape, as W.J.T. Mitchell said, may be considered not as a genre, but as a medium: it constitutes (itself as) a vehicle of power, acquires exchange value,Introduction and “Imperial Landscape,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002 ), 2 and 5. and can thus circulate just as a photograph would. One might even imagine landscape’s true significance only became apparent with the advent of photography. Photography, in turn, could not have achieved its full potential without modern (and then contemporary) means of communication — related as much to transportation as to transmission. For it had to travel. And if, like the trains before it, today’s Internet has allowed landscapes of the world to come to us in the form of images, the means of transportation and communication, on the other hand, have had a cruel impact on the landscape. Andreas RutkauskasCemetery - The Chippewas of Sarnia, Petrolia series, 2013.Photo : courtesy of the artist Photographs are mobile beings. They dawdle and amble around, rush, chase after the image, and sometimes travel through some curious places; one only has to think of those who take strolls “in” Google Street View or Google Earth, as Rutkauskas has done. Which goes to show that “if the landscape is not a place” Statement by Anne Cauquelin, who has been decried as a pure “culturalist” who excludes the possibility of a multi-sensorial reality and construes landscape exclusively as cultural construction, thus predetermined, rather than sensory (Anne Cauquelin, “Le paysage n’est pas un lieu,” Paysages sur commande (Rennes: Le Triangle, 1990), 92 — 96). (a debatable proposition), one sometimes has to immerse oneself in it in order to produce an image. As such, this applies as much to the Web as to physical sites. Landscape, then, beyond mere view, can be understood as an experience, a sensory one, “a kind of affective geography” that calls on more than one sense. Jean-Marc Besse, “Le paysage, espace sensible, espace public,” Meta: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy, vol. 2, no. 2 (2010): 268. As early as the 1950s, John Brinckerhoff Jackson had already called for an active perception or grasp of landscapes, the “discovery of mobility” John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Landscape in Sight: Looking at America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997 ), 204 — 205. having prompted a new way of experiencing the world. And one cannot help thinking that navigating Google Earth, with all the strange manoeuvres this requires, is indeed not a passive form of discovery. Andreas RutkauskasN 45° 28' 34" W 73° 37' 18", Virtually There series, 2010.Photo : courtesy of the artist From One Sublime to Another Rutkauskas’s series Virtually There (begun in 2009) joins Google Earth, a relatively recent technology that enables stay-at-home travel,Original expression, “voyage casanier,” from Pierre Bayard, Comment parler des lieux où l’on n’a pas été? (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2012). with the old photographic tradition of the sublime landscape. Landscape sublime in Canada is closely associated with the Rocky Mountains and train travel. Returning to Montréal from the opening of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1984, William McFarlane Notman brought back his groundbreaking pictures of the Western Rockies for the pleasure of armchair travellers, who were legion in the nineteenth century. The images have been endlessly reproduced ever since, first by explorers and travellers of all types, and then by tourists. Rutkauskas returned to the neighbourhood, but it is his Google-strolls that led him to particular sites and peaks. Exploring Google Earth while making some screen captures, he noted the coordinates that later allowed him to use a GPS device to find the actual site and retake the same pictures, this time with a large-format camera, as in the traditional production of majestic scenery. Andreas RutkauskasN 51° 23' 20" W 116° 17' 23", Virtually There series, 2010.Photo : courtesy of the artist There is a strange temporal contraction in this series in which variously dated technologies come together, as if the rush forward orchestrated by Google’s apparatus had taken us back in time. The primary role of representations of space and time (photography, by its cropping of the material, being the first medium suited to figuring them together) is seldom mentioned while discussing the “radical compression of spatial and temporal horizons” characteristic of modernity, a compression that is always said to be provoked by the advent of speedy transportation and communication.Jon May and Nigel Thrift, Timespace: Geographies of Temporality (London: Routledge, 2001), 7. The process of making the Virtually There series actualizes and makes visible this spatiotemporal compression, which has only intensified in the transition from the modern to the contemporary. Two recent series, Borderline (2012–2015) and the Stanstead Project, or How to Cross the Border (2011), explore some Canadian border zones. The photographs from the Stanstead Project were taken in and around a small town in the Eastern Townships that is cut in two by an increasingly watched border. Beyond the village, the black and white images show a wide trench running through the forest, a line that seems to cut through the whole breadth of the continent, perspectival lines vanishing toward infinity that simultaneously suggest crossings, migrations, and transgressions. Paradoxically, they invite us to follow the trajectory of this illuminated no man’s land, which seems to lie just outside real space. In the Suburb Beautiful series (2011), the ordinary landscapes that are multiplied and juxtaposed belong to the everyday. One could suppose them to be vernacular, but they are too civilized not to be political, they are too perfectly ordered, too consistent, and they lack the native singularities that mark the vernacular.John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). See also Jean-Marc Besse, “Le paysage, entre le politique et le vernaculaire. Réflexions à partir de John Brinckerhoff Jackson,” ARCHES, Tome 6 (2003), 9-27, HAL Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société, https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00113275. In fact, they are inscribed in geographic imagination as the absolute anti-sublime, as much in their configuration as in their use. The photographs in this series are fascinating, however, as they reveal landscape arrangements that are unfalteringly identical from one end of the land to the other. From Winnipeg to Sainte-Rose, in suburban Montréal, rowed cookie-cutter houses seem to draw lines, once again, that traverse the continent from East to West, almost without interruption. These well-aligned dwellings compose landscapes of mobility, of that social or socio-economic urban mobility that prompts city-dwellers to migrate to the periphery for various reasons, often financial. Andreas RutkauskasCutline IV, Stanstead Project series, 2011.Photo : courtesy of the artist Andreas RutkauskasKanata, Ontario, Suburb Beautiful series, 2008.Photo : courtesy of the artist Petrolia (2011) presents another facet of the landscape of economic mobility, one that could be said to be even more anti-sublime than that of the suburbs, but which attracts its own following of the curious, of photographers, and of sundry “dereliction tourists.” Bradley L. Garrett, “Undertaking Recreational Trespass: Urban Exploration and Infiltration,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 39, no. 1(January 2014): 2. This is the landscape of relocated industry, of capital flight. They are everywhere, these landscapes of the abandoned, of the disaffected and the decommissioned, of dispossession and contamination, proliferating throughout the world and in the photographs of many artists. Petrolia focuses on the petrochemical installations in an area known as Chemical Valley, near Sarnia, Ontario. The monicker recalls Chemical Corridor, which snakes along the Mississippi for about one hundred kilometres, from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, in Louisiana, and that locals have rechristened Cancer Corridor. Toxic or economically toxic landscapes? This type of photography, conjuring both the horrors and the glory of bygone industry, is now becoming a particularly appreciated form of the sublime, a post-industrial sublime. Andreas RutkauskasCul-de-sac, Suburb Beautiful series, 2007.Photo : courtesy of the artist Correspondences Accompanying the presentation of the Petrolia series on Rutkauskas’s website is the reproduction of a ten dollar bill, issued in the 1970s and showing Chemical Valley. A twenty dollar bill in the same “Canadian Scenes” series, printed from 1969 onward, represents Moraine Lake, one of the most photographed sites in the Rockies from the nineteenth century to the present. At the time, national pride seemed to range indifferently from the natural sublime through to the industrial sublime; and oddly, the printing of this series of banknotes corresponds exactly with the great disillusionment, the end of the post-WWII economic boom, rung in by the oil crisis and by cognizance of the irreversible damage industrial pollution has caused the world and nature. Andreas RutkauskasParking lot, Imperial Oil Complex in the Background,Petrolia series, 2013.Photo : courtesy of the artist Andreas RutkauskasPark and Nitrogen Fertilizer Plant, Town of Courtright, Petrolia series, 2013.Photo : courtesy of the artist According to Mitchell, landscape is a vast network of cultural codes and, like money, has no use in and of itself, but expresses an unlimited reserve of potential value.Mitchell, Landscape and Power, 5. Also: “Dig out all the gold in a mountainside, and its wealth is exhausted. But how many photographs, postcards, paintings, and awestruck ‘sightings’ of the Grand Canyon will it take to exhaust its value as landscape?”, 15. Jonathan Crary, for his part, connected money with photography, saying that they are both totalizing systems, capable of binding or unifying all subjects within a single global network of value and desire.Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992), 13. This dual association signals landscape’s complex capacity for awakening desire, for attracting travellers, conquerors, speculators, and for getting them to move, while itself being mobile when coupled with other mediums. It has therefore always engendered greed and geographic imaginings that involve a possessive, imperialist, or cupidinous gaze. Landscape — even if we now conceive that it may be experienced or inhabited, no longer merely a symbolic or cultural fabrication, perceptual and perspectival — remains nonetheless a constructed form whose value is based on exchange and circulation. Today, whether it be post-industrial, (peri-)urban, or natural — if such a thing still exists — the space-time characteristic of landscape, composed of constant movement, comings and goings that bring the distant near, the absent present, may be wholly determined by socio-economic phenomena: physical and electronic mobility, migrations in every direction, capital movement, and capital flight. Translated from the French by Ron Ross Andreas Rutkauskas, Suzanne Paquet

Perambulating, Wandering, Fleeing. A Few Notes on Mobile Landscapes

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