Landscapes are the archetypical form of painting, the style most often taken into the home. Sarah Browne looks here at the domestication of painting in a real environment.

Gareth Kennedy: photograph; courtesy the author

In the popular mind, painting equals landscape.

Landscape painting has been for about two hundred years a major preoccupation of painters and patrons. The landscape genre continues to be the most popular for people to buy (my own first encounters with art were with landscape paintings in my parent's house). Now as an artist, I realise that like most people I knew in art college, I came from the suburban / middle class demographic norm: from the typical kind of family that sends its well-fed young sons and daughters to art colleges around the country, subsequently buying the painted products of this matured assembly line in a wonderfully seamless cycle of production and consumption.

The aim of this article will be to examine the role of landscape painting, not at source (artist) nor at the point of distribution (gallery), but rather at a particular point of consumption in the home. Within Ireland's increasingly homogenous landscape, littered with the fallout of Bungalow Bliss and the ethics of the flatpack housing estate, what kind of landscape paintings do we choose to purchase and display in these houses, within this landscape? How do these landscape paintings act as marks of differentiation, as signifiers of class, aspiration and identity? What is their function in the suburban home and, ultimately, what do these paintings, as social documents, illustrate about our relationship to the exterior landscape?

I made for this article a case study of a suburban housing estate in a west Dublin dormitory town (but as befits suburbia, it 'could have been anywhere'). There were thirty houses, all of whose residents I visited and asked could I see, photograph and talk to them about their landscape paintings.

An intriguing pattern emerged. Firstly, nearly all of the paintings I saw were landscapes, and it quickly became established that, in almost every case, the owners of the painting had a direct relationship with the place depicted. 50% were of a tourist destination they had visited and acquired the painting there on holiday, 34% were depictions of childhood homes of the area where they grew up, and 16% were of other origin (typically wedding gifts, purchases at auctions or family heirlooms). Number 2 had paintings of Peru, Bolivia, Thailand and Africa, where they had travelled to when they were younger. The couple in Number 3 had two images of Lough Allen, Co. Leitrim, where they were from. One view was from the north side of the lake looking to the south (where she had grown up), the other from the southern side looking to the north (where he had grown up). They were hung on opposite sides of the fireplace. Number 17 had a number of paintings, all of Poland and by Polish artists, where they had lived for a number of years. Number 23 had a large number of paintings of Australian scenes, where they had emigrated to but returned from, and some landscapes of France where they spent holidays. Number 25 had a painting of Killarney (where the man was from) and Listowel (where his wife was from).

Sarah Browne: Untitled , 2004; courtesy the author

These paintings of childhood idylls and exotic locales were powerful evocations of place, declaring 'I am from here' and 'I have travelled here' — often in the same living room. There was an astonishing variety of places to travel to and from within the estate as I moved from house to house: each standardised house, looking out onto a similar exterior view, had created a totally independent interior landscape. This of course is easily explainable in the uncanny familiarity of the suburban environment: in a place with no distinguishing characteristics except uniformity, the importance of interior individuality creeps to the fore. With an exterior leached of any possibility of deviance or the addition of a distinctive personal touch, it is the interior life of the suburban house that offers the only option to create the illusion of a personally determined living space. ¹

A remarkable proportion of the paintings were purchased directly as souvenirs of a holiday, the painting in the process becoming transformed into a kind of large-format, 'classy' and more permanent version of a postcard (to the self) to be savoured and enjoyed vicariously after the end of the tourist experience. In this, the proprietary nature of the tourist gaze is linked to that of the painter, making explicit the well-worn idea of the gaze as a kind of ownership. (My experience of working in a commercial gallery in Dublin city also attests to this desire of the tourist to remember the visual through the eyes of someone else, namely an artist: tourists frequently ask for (a) a 'local artist', who (b) makes representational landscape images.)

How far away one can travel from home involves layers of touristic status. It was sometime around the eighteenth century when travel began to be constituted as a form of knowledge, a spatial education; to be knowledgeable meant to be well-travelled. Wandering or travelling became a 'way' to know, a privilege that transformed knowledge itself into a geographical matter. The practice of travel continues to enforce profound social divisions, more blurred now than in the past (though classist distinctions are conventionally made between 'travel' and 'tourism'). The landscape paintings in most people's homes were located in the 'living room', the buffer zone between public and private where any visitors, especially on more formal occasions or for acquaintances not familiar enough to be entertained in the kitchen, are usually received. To this end, the paintings functioned not only as private objects for personal consumption, but also as potent signifiers in a system that displayed class origins, aspirations and achievements on a more public level.

In Number 28, there were no paintings at all but instead a reworking of the travel theme through a collection of maps. Like tourist landscapes, maps involve imaginative spaces and explorations — from wall maps to atlases to globes to painting, ornament and mapping progressed hand in hand. ² Their viewing pleasure entails a form of journey, stimulating, recalling, and substituting for bodily travel. Since the eighteenth century, the function of the map and the topo­graphical-view painting has been to induce recollection and desire for the actual tourist and to provide an imaginary voyage for the 'home body'. A body thus became a spectator and left home by way of these mental journeys. The landscape painting as a kind of 'window' into an imagined space emerged as the obvious theme, a point of departure for escape into nostalgic memories of childhood or holidays. These paintings of idealised landscapes are of crucial importance in suburbia, forming an alternative window to the architectural one, providing vistas that would otherwise be denied to the suburban dweller. In each of the houses I was in, I could look out the livingroom window onto an almost identical view, typically of other houses facing me. The painted landscapes give an alternative space, a surface that can be dreamed into, or simply be present as a subconscious reminder that other worlds are possible:

A body of spectatorship [leaves] home by way of topographic journeys. The very equation of body with home, and home with body, was shattered with the creation of a different type of voyage — a travelling 'domestic'. Not just a vicarious type of journey, this was the reenactment of a different form of voyage — an interior voyage, a phantasmic journey, an experience of heterotopia . ³

Sarah Browne: Untitled (Peru) , 2004; courtesy the author

This idea of a suburban spectatorship relates to the idea of the picturesque, the history of which intertwines with the history of tourism and participated in shaping its views. Initially referring to 'a scene proper for painting' ⁴ , this late-eighteenth-century movement was a complex and ultimately elusive notation of taste in landscape aesthetics and tourism, and it can be seen as a method of processing the physical world for our consumption. This spectator relationship, closely bound up with tourism and the 'leisure industries', is a mark of significant difference between contemporary attitudes to the land and those of earlier periods, and is an idea that remains highly pertinent when discussing the landscape paintings viewed in this suburban context:

It seems that the question [of what sort of landscape painting is possible today] is part of a larger question still; that of how present day industrial society relates to the land on which it depends for food and raw materials, but toward which most members of that society relate principally as spectators. We do not work it, own it, or live in it; we pass through and look at The Scenery . ⁵

Sarah Browne: Untitled (France) , 2004; courtesy the author

The suburban house, with its double-glazing and central heating, functions as a kind of insulated micro-environment. The house typically acts as a location for rest between periods of travel, be it daily travel (commuting to work) or holiday travel further afield. Travel is between a beginning and an end, a circular form in which the point of departure is as influential as the destination, and suburbia occupies a comparable transitional state, temporally and spatially 'between' (work and leisure, city and country). Experience of the landscape is often visual rather than lived or embodied, that of a passive spectator being transported through it, witness to moving vistas in cars and trains or static paintings when 'at home'. The home these paintings hint at occupies a territory between origin and destination, a kind of "service stop along the way to more desirable places." ⁶  It is these 'more desirable places' that are represented in the paintings.

It should be obvious that the theme of 'the Land' in the Irish context doesn't only refer to some outdated, confused notion of nationalism or agriculture: witness the boom of newspaper articles, TV programmes and other media manifestations of people 'going back to the land' in search of 'the good life'; debates over organic versus GM foods; the surplus of planning tribunals; continuing urban sprawl and the gentrification of inner-city areas. The decentralisation of government departments is simply the latest factor to boost further Ireland's mushrooming production of suburban housing estates. All of these trends testify to the continuing relevance to daily life of themes to do with the land and the landscape.

The Ballymun towers, soon to be no more, are the emblematic vision of Ireland's failed modernist housing project, often cited as 'a blight on the landscape'. Cultural workers and organisations continue to address this issue and its social implications. However, architect Sean Kearns (who is working on the regeneration development) comments, "Wait until you see the future of the vast housing estates of Dublin's satellite towns. They are the time bombs." ⁷

Sarah Browne: Untitled (France) , 2004; courtesy the author

With these issues in mind, what kind of critical landscape painting is possible today? The suburban house (a multiple that does not really existing in the singular) is an unconvincing icon to replace the Irish cottage, though no less socially significant. The relevance of this suburban landscape is twofold, most immediately in terms of its increasing dominance as a visual feature of the Irish landscape. What about a landscape painting that represents or addresses this obvious trend? Here the work of Eithne Jordan springs to mind as an example of work that accepts and identifies contemporary issues surrounding landscape, depicting not only conventionally beautiful rural scenes, but showing the presence of modernist building sites and concrete flyovers.

The other salient point with regard to the suburban condition is that the increasingly large demographic of the middle-class suburban dweller forms the core of conventional art audiences, weekend trippers to galleries and Sunday painters, as well as being the major provider of fresh blood to the art institutions — it seems there is something of a rich cultural territory that is not being explored or addressed here. Notions of site-specificity have traditionally been aligned with the sculptural tradition, (with a few exceptions) ⁸ , but what kind of painting would result from looking at some of these ideas: what would a landscape painting be like that was made not for a gallery wall, but a living room wall — since so many landscape paintings end up on the walls of suburban houses anyway, why not operate with a critical awareness of this fact?

Sarah Browne: Untitled (home) , 2004; courtesy the author

Just as tourists often complain about problems caused by their own presence, so artists are complicitous in the way the world is seen. Often considered or dismissed as simply decorative, landscape painting has for centuries had a valuable social function, its iconography acting as the bearer of national and regional ideologies. What I am calling for here is a form of critical activity that looks at the many issues — environmental, social, political — surrounding the land and the landscape in the contemporary context. To paraphrase David Brett ⁹ , if painting and the other visual arts cannot cope with it, then they are in a depleted condition indeed.

Sarah Browne  is currently artist-in-residence at Bolwick Arts, Norfolk.

¹ This of course goes some way towards explaining DIY and interior decorating obsessions, and for most of the people I spoke to, landscape paintings fitted into this matrix of interior decor. Paintings that were not of sentimental value were purchased according to their suitability in relation to the prevailing colour scheme, and competed for attention with other objects such as striped wallpapers, televisions and ornaments on mantelpieces.
² The wall map became a feature of domestic interiors first in the sixteenth century, when maps were produced in great number as objects of display suitable for wall decoration. Other cartographic objects such as atlases brought the world into domestic space, while the globe reduced it to a miniature size, easy to 'handle' in one's own home. – Giuliana Bruno, Haptic journeys, from Wonderland, ed. Rochelle Steiner, San Louis Art Museum, 2000, p. 144.
³ Bruno, op.cit., p. 148
⁴ Bruno, op.cit., p. 152
⁵ David Brett, The land and the landscape, CIRCA 43, pp. 14 –18

⁶ Lucy Lippard, The tourist at home, in On the Beaten Track—Tourism, Art and Place, New Press, New York, 1999, p. 50
⁷ Shane Hegarty, Raising the new town, The Irish Times, Saturday 4 July, 2004
⁸ I am thinking here of Brian Maguire's work in São Paolo, where the portraits he made of the street children were hung in their homes, and the resulting photograph became the work shown in the gallery. Granted this work was based on the tradition of portraiture, but it presents a challenging model for a critical practice of landscape painting that could have a direct engagement with a site and an audience. Another interesting project addressing peoples' relationship with art in their living space (though dealing with sculpture), was the Stations project in Kilkenny. In this project, pieces from the Butler Gallery's collection were given to people to live with for a month; see www.butlergallery.com/sitefiles/ExhibitionsPast.html and Nathalie Weadick's article in CIRCA 108, p. 55.
⁹ Brett, op. cit., p. 18

Article reproduced from CIRCA 109, Autumn 2004, pp. 33-37.

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