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Disappearing into land
Bryony Gillard on Lucy Lippard and Marie Yates.
1.
 In
1977, Lucy R. Lippard spent a year near Dartmoor as a period of
reflection and retreat from her life in New York 1). From her
time spent walking and thinking in the landscape came the foundations of
her survey publication, Overlay, which draws together prehistoric
monuments with land art practices of the 1960s and 70s 2).
Lippard describes the text as “an overlay of my concern with new art on
my fascination with these very ancient sites” 3). Through
this endeavour, Lippard creates a process of layering, overlapping and
colliding: Minimalist art practices and ancient landscapes — layered,
multifaceted histories in flux.
In an interview in 2010, Lippard
alludes to a short story also written in Devon during 1977, which could
be considered both a symptom of, and reaction to, her on going enquiry
into connection with place:
“I got so obsessed about place whilst living on this farm in Devon that
I wrote a short story which I never published about a woman who got so
involved in a place that she disappeared into it (laughs). She went into
the land and never reappeared.”4)
For some time I have found myself returning to this anecdote, searching
for some trace of the story’s existence, but it appears that this text,
like its protagonist, has disappeared into landscape.
2.
Six years prior, Marie Yates was making work (or, one could say,
‘thought experiments’) with similar concerns in the same landscape. The
Field Workings exist as documents of experiences, assemblages or
performances made on journeys in the South West between 1971-74 5).
Many of The Field Workings took place on Dartmoor, a site of remote,
open space, simultaneously vivid with corporeal connections to past
civilisations. Constellations of standing stones, quoits, cairns and
menhirs stand in for human acts, layers of collaboration with the land;
temporal distance folded into physical space.
Lippard cites Yates’ The Field Workings in Overlay, describing their
construction of “an attitude of awareness of the basic components of our
universe, mostly disregarded unremembered or ignored” 6).
Yates’ drive to avoid hierarchising the cerebral, sensual and political
experience of place remains central to her practice, finding meaning in
the disregarded or unremembered or, in her own words, “attempting the
unrepresentable”7).
The events chronicled by The Field Workings retreated back into the
landscape or the imagination. The tension between fictional provocations
and factual record is antagonised, just as Yates prods at the binaries
of nature/culture in her 1978 bookwork, A critical re-evaluation of a
proposed publication, which explores how the “appropriation of nature
has been politicised into the mystification of the relationships between
people.”8)
3.
Lippard’s lost story and the notion of disappearing into place seem
pertinent to Yates’ practice and wider discourse around female
land-based practices. Just as Overlay performs the function of its
title, overlaying histories and practices, perhaps the lost story could
be read in the same way — layers of the manifold interpretations and
meanings of disappearance into landscape.
Although some ground breaking women artists are credited historically
within the canon of land art, there is an unsurprising gender (and race)
imbalance in discussion around practices from this era. However, like
many modernist movements, it appears there were many female
practitioners, but most have been overlooked or forgotten by the
dominant narratives. This disappearance of the female voice is another
layer to the lost story: these women went into the land, but have not
reappeared.
It is quite possible, however, that many female artists found the mantle
of land art too constrictive, preferring to align themselves to more
open or transgressive fields such as ecofeminism. Indeed, the act of
disappearance itself could also be considered a form of resistance,
retreat or active withdrawal in order to overcome or circumnavigate a
male-dominated canon. As a phallocentric construct, many feminists
advocated an active withdrawal from canonisation — to remain outside,
resisting attempts at the categorisation of their work.9) In
the case of Lippard and Yates, there is also a relationship between the
outside of the canon and the outside of the landscape — with both women
choosing Dartmoor as a site for their thinking, its remoteness (and
wildness) playing an important function in their ability to carry out
this work — a space in which to experiment, reflect, explore and
respond.
Equally, disappearing into land could be read as an absorption or
assimilation: landscape as a powerful force, taking over the body, body
returning to the land, woman as earth element, the destruction of
nature/human oppositions and binaries. In Yates’ Sound Placements I-IV
(1970) there is a drive to both record, but also become, the aural
quality of the landscape. Natural sounds are combined with percussion or
subtle musical accompaniment, a blurring of land and body through sound,
experience and performance. This notion of disappearance-as-assimilation
could be seen as a type of return, re-joining with the land, a becoming.
4.
Perhaps what links all these layers of disappearance is the notion of a
continuous movement – a journey, but also a state of flux. In a recent
video work entitled Distance: On Not Going Home (2015) Yates explores
the notion of exile and her experiences of living in Crete during a time
of profoundly troubling political change. In revisiting her earlier
work, this piece moves through decades, images, texts and landscapes,
layers of history, memory and description. 10)
Yates' own position of self-imposed exile (from her country of birth and
to some extent from her earlier works) enables her to use her own
practice as a canon against which to react – to reposition, revise and
re-read past work through the lens of her contemporary concerns.
Suddenly, through this act of disappearance, everything becomes
wonderfully unfixed, the artist disappearing and reappearing in
different landscapes, modes of thought and times.
As with her wider practice, Yates avoids dichotomy but does however make
an important distinction between enforced and self-imposed exile:
referencing Edward Said - "the achievements of exile are permanently
undermined by the loss of something left behind forever" 11)
— against shots of Cretan ports, alluding to the violence and
irreversibility of enforced exile.
5.
The territory around disappearance and disappearing practices is
unstable and in some cases treacherous. Represented in a contemporary
context, these works risk the possibility of fetishisation: the
overlooked (or disappeared) now rediscovered and claimed by institutions
and curators, archived and positioned in retrospect into genres they may
have resisted or else been originally excluded from.
In order to navigate the land around these historical practices, we need
to understand better why the work of these artists disappeared, and how
they can be celebrated in meaningful and sensitive ways. Turning again
to Yates' bookwork, A critical re-evaluation, perhaps we can start by
not making binary distinctions between enforced and self-imposed
disappearance, but by reflecting upon the range of implications and
motivations behind this act.
Exploring the contemporary works of these artists could be a useful way
in which to understand disappearance — to consider it as a state of
movement or flux, a position that is continually shifting, and one that
is reflected in the title of Yates’ recent video work: tracing
distances, differences, belonging and withdrawal.
1) Interestingly, Lippard initially came to the remote
South West to concentrate on a novel, but quickly became fascinated with
the numerous megalithic sites in the landscape. Lippard, L.R. (1983).
Overlay. New York: The New Press, p.1
2) Ibid
3) Ibid, p.1
4) White, R. (2010). Lucy Lippard on place, places and conceptual art
(interview). Art Cornwall. [online] Available at:
http://www.artcornwall.org/interviews/Lucy_Lippard.htm [Accessed 19 Dec
2014]
5)This refers to the series Field Workings 1971-73 (1971-73) and the
Durgan Field Working (1974)
made for the Arts Council exhibition An Element of Landscape. The
initial project lasted for three years and was based on journeys made by
Marie Yates, starting out from London accompanied by David Toop.
6) Lippard, L.R. (1983). Overlay. New York: The New Press, p.37
7) Yates, M. (2015). On Not Going Home. [online] Available at: http://www.users.otenet.gr/~myates/onnotgoinghome20.html
[Accessed 12 Nov 2015]
8) Crichton, F. Marie Yates. Studio International 3/1977, p. 184
9) In her 1989 essay, Illiterations, the experimental writer and
academic Christine Brooke-Rose wrote about the impossibility of women
writers (and artists) to enter a cultural canon. Brooke-Rose suggests
this is because the notion of a canon is a male construct, and if female
practitioners are fortunate enough to gain recognition by the
establishment, it is as a means to categorise their work and align it to
a male genre. Brooke-Rose adds that canonisation serves the purpose of
promotion of the individual artist genius (a male pursuit) and to enable
the establishment (critics, etc.) to label authors: “women are rarely
considered seriously part of a movement when it is ‘in vogue’; and they
are damned with a label when it no longer is, when they can safely be
considered as minor elements of it.” Brooke-Rose advocates “more
withdrawal and less belonging” for women writers/artists – to resist
categorisation/canonisation and remain outside.
Brooke-Rose, C. Illiterations In Ellen Friedman and Miriam Fuchs,
Breaking the Sequence: Women's Experimental Fiction (New Jersey:
Princetown University Press, 1989). p. 55 – 71
10) Yates, M. (2015). On Not Going Home. [online] Available at: http://www.users.otenet.gr/~myates/onnotgoinghome20.html
[Accessed 12 Nov 2015]
11) Ibid
Bryony Gillard is an artist who works across writing, performance,
installation and music. Originally presented at 'Throwing Stones',
Arnolfini (October 2015), this extended essay was later commissioned for
publication to accompany 'The Sun Went In, The Fire Went Out' at Chelsea
Art Space. Also see
http://www.artcornwall.org/interviews/Marie_Yates.htm
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