That Awesome Space

View and discuss spectacular views of the West: film sequences and photographs: aerial views, scenes from the Grand Canyons The landscape seems to stretch out forever. It is a land of superlatives. It is like every name in the West is preceded with an adjective like Great, Grand, or Hell. The landscape within this area contains some of the most startling and striking scenes on the face of the earth: the most austere, unspoiled landscape, seemingly above the hand of man, often identified with the hand of God. The American West offered the earth sciences outstanding opportunities and an ease of access to geologic information not available in the East or Europe. It was from the West, for example, that fossils, like O.C. Marshs Eohippus, were excavated to offer brilliant confirmation to Darwins theory of evolution. The West gave American geology an unrivaled opportunity for the decipherment of earth history, and by the early twentieth century an American school of geology had developed, with accomplishments recognized throughout the world. Geologists look to the Grand Canyon, for example, from the point of view of a very long time span, one almost commensurate with the age of earth itself. The Grand Canyon is a great natural laboratory that is of value not only to America, but to civilization itself. The deep recesses of the Grand Canyon reveal layer upon layer of deposition, uplift, redeposition and the agonizingly slow process of erosion from perhaps the most dramatic reminder of what geologic time means. Geological time as vast as astronomical space, patient, inexorable, sublime. The Grand Canyon a cross-section of earth history, a bit of the American West which exemplified the meaning and enormity of geologic time like nothing else on the globe. The Grand Canyon its exploration, the descent through the Colorado canyons by John Wesley Powell became one of the epic sagas of the West. To go through the canyon, Major Powell braved the gushing cataracts and muddy torrent of the Colorado River in 1869. The journey provided fodder for the romantic imagination. Western monumentalism The Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Monument Valley iconic American places. The relationship of National Parks to American cultural nationalism and the forging of an American identity. Natural monuments proof of American exceptionalism. Geographical manifest destiny. A national landscape which created a national aesthetic. The canyon as cultural spectacle. A natural wonderland Americans wonder at the world (natural and man-made). Wilderness as national symbol, sacred remnant of gods handiwork. A celebration of non-Indian wilderness.

Natural monumentalism and its reflection in the visual arts Here at last were mountains, canyons, and other natural wonders whose uniqueness needed no qualifications. The landscape painter was among the first to respond enthusiastically. The young nation turned with pride to natural wonders like Yellowstone and Yosemite in reply to European sneers that it lacked such cultural adornments as decaying castles and cathedrals. Bierstadt, Moran, John Ford

Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902)

It became plain to Bierstadt that the image of the West was there to be exploited. The West made America unique among nations, and nobody was painting big panoramas of it. Albert Bierstadt set out to do this. American landscape Bierstadt painted landscapes that became distinctly American not necessarily for reasons of accuracy but because the West as visualized by B. could excite dreams and lots that would become characteristically American. He gave the viewer an almost physical sense of westward transfiguration. B. reshaped the landscape into a logic conducive to Americans dreams: The Oregon Trail (Emigrants Crossing the Plains) (1867) is a pictorial epic of the wagon trains moving westward, a visual paean to Manifest Destiny. This is an ancient, pristine land, uninhabited by white people. Bleached cattle bones scattered in the foreground, the emblems of earlier death on the trail, suggest the uninhabitable nature of the land. But the live cattle next to them are fat, and for these settlers everything sets fair: their wagons roll on into a beckoning sunset of such excessive splendor that it is obvious that God himself is calling them on, flooding their enterprise with metaphorical gold. "Progress", as one orator of the day put it, "is God!" There are signs of Indian presence a few distant tepees but they are almost invisible in the radiance, and the farthest wagons are already past them. Getting there was extremely difficult. The artist also had to be an explorer, scientist, educator, frontiersman and minister. He ran arduous risks and suffered extreme hardships which certified his "heroic" status. And some of the works resulting from the artists heroic journeys west were themselves vast and monumental. Romantic vistas of the American continent in vast, panoramic scale. large canvases / American bigness Bierstadt's Western superviews were an instant success. They thrilled Americans with panoramic views of a far, distant part of their land. They brought a visualization of American grandeur and romance for the first time in American painting.

The grandeur of representation of the mountains, the vastness of the subject, demanded wide stretches of canvas, so that the eye could absorb any detail and wander here and there, getting the impression of absolute freedom. operatic landscape Bierstadt became the orchestrator of mighty Wagnerian scenes, which exaggerated the vertical thrust of the mountains to achieve the monumental grandeur which Americans had come to expect from their continent. Liminal space B. the prime translator of the Romantic Sublime in American terms. The Far West memorialized by Bierstadt was a region of psychological transfiguration, a liminal space (border space) demonstrating how the American wilderness masters the colonist. Melodrama. Everything is overstated. A hyperbolic logic. Melodrama it refuses common sense and moderation. Melodramatic surfaces are asked to bear an excess of meaning. A lawless world that evokes too much emotional fervor, too much astonishment at the sensational, the lurid and the extravagant. Stirring atmospheric effects, dizzying volumes and stark contrasts. Stark abysses, brilliant ascents, gigantic trees, blazing reflections, impassable and impossible terrains which remind us of nothing so much as of our dreams. In Sunset in the Yosemite Valley (1868), light emerges from the center of the canvas, hot enough to be molten lava burning a hole through the cosmos. Yet without the title, the time of day remains indeterminate, anticipating the kind of day-for-night shots produced through filters by cinematographers. The sun appears too high and bright for actual sunset, and the valley is too dark, even with low-lying wisps of clouds. The granite mountains rise out of blinding brightness to tower over the sides of the canvas in Bierstadts signature mode. The paintings stunning effect is unreal, excessive, overdone. Accuracy? Bierstadt altered actual sites as he wished, working much as a stage designer assembling some fantastic set. He indulged in dramatic excess. A mixture of topographical features organized for theatrical effect rather than for referential accuracy. Composite landscapes. Half a dozen centers of interest vie for the viewers attention in a kind of cinematic competition. There is no actual view which corresponds to his Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak (1863) for example, but this did not matter for Bierstadt's audience. Far misty crags rising behind a glassy lake and its waterfall, brilliantly lit by a shaft of sun in the middle distance; a Native encampment set amid a majestic mountainous landscape; small Indian figures set in an idyll of primitive immensity, with the reverberations of an ancient, wise and peaceful civilization from which the White Man could learn something at the time of the bloody Civil War. Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California (1868) Bierstadt gave much attention to details, even in the reflection on the water. The sensation of majesty and impressive grandeur is realized by contrasting the great mountains with the human being, or with a buffalo, a tiny canoe or, in this case, with a herd of deer that has come to drink

at the edge of a mirror-like mountain lake. The contrast between the massive escarpments and these tiny elements establishes the enormous scale of the landscape, so that the viewer does not lose himself in the landscape physically, but emotionally. Bierstadts paintings have serenity, a stillness of things, as if Time does not flow anymore and Nature is enshrined into a crystal. The center of the painting (as well as the center of Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak) attracts the eye by a light-flooded waterfall, which balances the whole image and acts as a counterweight of light against the darker corners. The lone lake has the function of a mirror of the sky. And the mirror of the lake has a spiritual function. It becomes a vehicle which carries the mind's eye from the specific objectivity of the present moment and place to a transcendent cosmos beyond time. The peak of Bierstadts career coincided with the boom in Western business logging, mining, and above all, railroads. Financiers who were making fortunes in the West by destroying wilderness wanted trophies of the wilderness in its Edenic state. When the transcontinental railroad was at last completed in 1869, its vice-president commissioned from Bierstadt a large canvas commemorating the landscape where its greatest difficulties had been overcome: the Donner Pass, in the Sierra Nevada. The two men rode up together, to pick the right spot. Constructing a track across the pass had been an immense feat of engineering and labor. Once the track was laid, much of it had to be covered with "snow-sheds", timber-framed tunnels that kept the snowdrifts off the tracks. These can be seen on the right of Bierstadt's vista. Donner Lake from the Summit a small straight line among the granite peaks. Bierstadt poured all his rhetoric into this canvas, seen with a Gods eye view from an overlook. We can see the early morning sun burning through the vapors above the lake; the grim ramparts of rock, the stand of sequoias (the biggest trees in the world are dwarfed by the scale of the landscape) and the brilliant blue eye of the lake. Donner Lake from the Summit is the patriarch of all American travel posters. It was not for nothing that a journalist remarked that "Albert Bierstadt has copyrighted all the principal mountains". In order to protect American landscape, you have to create it first artistically, to make the public aware of its beauty and of the need to protect it. Bierstadts mighty canvases would forever popularize the same breathtaking Yosemite vistas, and immortalize the West as a sublime, natural paradise, a wonderland for the traveler and the tourist, to be discovered and experienced in its romantic splendor. Domes of Yosemite (1867) Yosemite, shortly after Bierstadts visit there, was set aside for "public use, resort and recreation" in a bill passed and signed by President Lincoln. The idea that any part of the West could be blotted out by industry would have seemed barely conceivable to its admirers, but it had come to pass. Except in the national parks, the Western landscape by 1890 started to be disfigured by mining, clear-cutting, damming, railroad construction, and pollution. The U.S. government's policy of slaughtering the buffalo herds of the plains had destroyed the food base of the Plains Indians. The near extinction of the buffaloes prompted Albert Bierstadt to paint, in 1889,

The Last of the Buffalo. It shows no white hunters with rifles. The blame for the ecocide is put on the Indians themselves. Bierstadt painted not the real West but a drop cloth for the Western, as a place waiting for characters and plots of the sort that took shape in the paintings of Frederic Remington and Charles Russell, in the stories of Harte and Wister. He created phantasmagorical canvases where narrative has yet to begin. Bierstadt maps a Far West terrain and Harte molds a set of Western characters that together inspire a host of subsequent melodramas whether on Wisters Wyoming cattle ranch, Zane Greys plateaus of purple sage or John Fords Monument Valley. His canvases seem to beg for Bierstadt brings pictorial representation eerily close to the cinematic and novelistic. In Fords Stagecoach, the coach is framed against a commanding view of Monument Valley that stretches out like a phantasm. The towering buttes (including the Mittens), immense mesas, jutting outcroppings, all posed against a broad expanse of desert: the vertical and horizontal planes of landscape seem to defy each other in a vertiginous setting that Ford would repeat in ten other Westerns, that would regularly be copied by other movie-makers, a landscape that has since become the stereotype of the Far West. Into the midst of this Bierstadtian landscape comes the cowboy outlaw in the person of Ringo Kid (John Wayne), twirling his Winchester, challenging the stage to stop (even as the camera zooms in on him at close range). With Ringos addition to the passengers as a mediating figure, the democratizing process of regeneration can begin. Throughout the film moreover, the Americanizing process is defined by identification with a landscape that is itself lent a heroically national cast in part through sheer immensity, in part through the Apaches who peer down in domination from the heights. Fords selfconscious incorporation of Bierstadt and Harte in a single enterprise, moreover, serves as a representative instance of the Westerns more general reliance on conventions first invented by those two artists.

Thomas Moran (1837-1926)

The turning point in Moran's career came in 1871, when the United States Geological Survey invited him to join an expedition into the Yellowstone area of Wyoming. At that time Yellowstone was terra incognita to the white man. Its hot mud lakes, geysers, and constant geothermical activity had given this region the reputation of "the place where Hell bubbled up". The expedition was backed by the U.S. government and Northern Pacific government. The latter reasoned, shrewdly, that the circulation of Moran's images of Yellowstone, and the publicity they got, might create a new tourist destination and thus open a profitable new railroad line. Visually speaking, it was Thomas Moran who brought America around to the realization that Yellowstone must be preserved. Moran visited the great geyser basin around Old Faithful "On entering the basin, we saw at no great distance before us an immense body of sparkling water, projected suddenly and with terrific force into the air to the height of 5

over one hundred feet. We had found a real geyser. In the valley before us were a thousand hot springs of various sizes and character, and five hundred craters jetting forth vapor". On Moran's heels came the public, their numbers by the turn of the century swelling to tens of thousands. Thus began the "tourists frontier" in the Far West, as insistent as the frontiers of the trappers, hunters and miners that had preceded it. The fumaroles, sulfur pinnacles and Dantesque hot lakes of Yellowstone made Moran complain, with regretful enthusiasm, that "these beautiful tints are beyond the reach of human art". But the example of Joseph Turner's painting had been a providential act, which equipped Moran with the right tools to paint Yellowstone. Moran painted scenes that were too vast, too complex, and too grand for verbal description. The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (1872) rivaled Church and outdid Bierstadt in offering the panoramic thrill that no watercolor could give and no photograph could rival. The only failure was the fact that Moran was unable to provide a human figure, which could enable the viewer to establish the monumental scale of the canvas. The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone became a prime symbol of wilderness tourism, and it influenced the decision of Congress to transform Yellowstone into a national park. To those back east who saw Moran's work on his return to New York, his watercolors looked as thrillingly alien as photos from the moon. Georgia OKeeffe Heroic landscape versus heroic people Painting: Alfred Jacob Millers The Lost Greenhorn; Emmanuel Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way; Perhaps the most convincing testimony to the continuing appeal of the bucolic is supplied by advertisements Americans are most likely to buy the cigarettes, beer, and automobiles they can associate with a rustic setting. Scenes from: The Big Trail, Westward the Women, The Searchers. Born of Irish immigrant parents, John Ford had the outsiders optimistic view of the West. He liked to lace is skyline low in the frame, dominated by sky and space, but showing mans relationship to that space and his ability to conquer it. Fords films are always characterized by men and riders linking land and sky, often in heroic silhouette The Horse Soldiers. The western landscape is an environment inimical to human beings, where a person is exposed, the sun beats down, and there is no place to hide. It is a land defined by absence: of trees, of greenery, of houses, of the signs of civilization, of water and shade.

Be brave, be strong enough to endure this, the landscape says, and you will become like this hard, austere, sublime. Characteristically, the landscape is the site of ordeal, proving the man as nothing else can. The desert is a proving ground not only for the body, it is also a spiritual proving ground. At the same time the monolithic, awe-inspiring character of the landscape seems to reflect a desire for self-transcendence, an urge to join to something greater. The desert is the classic Western landscape because of the messages it sends: the qualities that nature possesses power, endurance, rugged majesty are the ones desired by men. To be a man in a Western is to seem to grow out of the environment, which means to be hard, tough and unforgiving. The desert itself is the great exemplar of ascesis. The hero imitates the deserts fierceness in his hard struggle to survive, its loneliness in his solitary existence, and its silence in his frugal way with language. Westerns give small rein to the bodys need for food, sleep, shelter, sex, and overall comfort. The capacity to stand physical pain is central to the heros identity. The Wests larger-than-life scenery and the human trials and tribulations that accompany the towering mountains, bleak deserts and vast plains have, according to popular mythology, nurtured an exceptional and enviable western character. The western character is reckoned to be particularly rugged and resourceful, open and honest, though prone to violent and vengeful acts when situations warrant. Western mythology has constructed a western character to match the Wests dramatic scenery. American landscape is a tabula rasa on which man can write, as if for the first time, the story he wants to live. It is full of promise. It is the vacuum domicilium the Puritans had imagined, waiting to be peopled. The apparent emptiness makes the land desirable not only as a space to be filled but also as a stage on which to perform and as a territory to master. There is a tremendous tension in Westerns between the landscape and town. The genre pulls toward the landscape that is its point. Town threatens to entrap the hero in the very thing the genre most wishes to avoid: intimacy, mutual dependence, a network of social and emotional responsibilities. The West as an embodiment of the American Dream Discuss several paintings: John Gasts American Progress (Westward Ho!), Albert Bierstadts Oregon Trail, Fanny Palmer, Immigrants Crossing the Plains, Thoreau: Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free we go westward as we go into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.

The West supplied the physical terrain for Americas mythology. The West was the embodiment of a promise it was the place in which your real identity could still be carved, where your potential could still be developed. It was a land of dreams do not forget that the world of the imagination is a real one too; ideas, in their own ways, are as hard and as real as rocks. The Great Plains compared to mountainous landscape. The pleasure felt when the eye is free to roam far away over open spaces is known to anyone who looks out to sea or across plains. So it is with the landscape of the West. It is a psychic reality as surely as it is a physical substance it is overwhelmingly awesome. Magic mystery, silence, serenity, privacy the exhilaration of coming upon the unknown, of exploring the untrodden, of being alone with nature and natures gods and spirits of experiencing the awesomeness of space as known in the West. Big skies, long, lonely distances, breath-taking terrain, isolated homesteads of logs and sod roofs, frontier-looking small towns with wide main streets and false front buildings, remote and scattered industrial and commercial centers, some of them already forlorn and weathered reminders of local and regional booms of the past. And, above all, the spaciousness, expansiveness and numerous unspoiled, awesome magical vistas that satisfied the viewers soul with a sense of majestic beauty, serenity and timelessness. A huge literature, as well as paintings and photographs, document the awe that explorers and pioneers felt for this land. Agoraphobia There is a word for the special kind of terror that results from perception of space: agoraphobia. It has to do with being overwhelmed, with being infinitely trivialized, with having lost all your bearings that let you know exactly where and what you are. There are records of people who went mad crossing the Great Plains. Nothing had seemed mad about them previously; something just came unglued in those long days of sameness, days out on that hard sea where the horizon appeared no closer at dusk than it had been at dawn. John Ford Monument Valley Anthony Mann: I never understood why most Westerns are shot in desert landscapes! John Ford, for example, adores Monument Valley, but I know Monument Valley very well and it's not the whole West. The desert represents only one part of the American West. I wanted to show the mountains, the waterfalls, the forested areas, the snowy summits, to rediscover the whole Daniel Boone atmosphere. The characters emerge more fully from such an environment. Discuss fragments from Ole Roolvags Giants in the Earth