Peter von Tiesenhausen: Sightings

a catalogue essay published by the Michael Gibson Gallery, London, Ontario, in November 2007

Image courtesy of the artist.

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       Rather charmingly, and through no fault of his own, Peter von Tiesenhausen has become an obstacle to the appreciation of his art. This is so because his interesting life is the stuff from which art-world legends are spun; and because such legends inevitably cloud the understanding of what artists make.
       In reviews and notices of his work, including ones I have written, the myth that’s grown up around the artist is usually close at hand. The imagery is well-known to admirers of von Tiesenhausen’s work: the rugged outdoors man working his land in rural Alberta, a former gold prospector in the Yukon, legal adversary of the resource industries, voluntary dweller with his wife and sons in the wilds hours west of anywhere--a very far cry, that is, from the more familiar (and hence less entertaining) black-clad urban dandies, quick with fashionable cultural theories, who produce much contemporary painting and sculpture. 
       The problem with Von Tiesenhausen--it is our problem, I hasten to add, not his--is that Western culture has always engendered in its citizens a fascination with people like this artist, who appear to have gotten away from urban civilization, somehow escaped the complexities, compromises and discontents of city life.
       It’s a very old story. The forest hermit, the knight errant and the fabled Wild Man took turns playing the part of the exotic outsider in medieval European literary romance. The Enlightenment (and Truffaut) gave us the Wild Child, raised by wolves far from the contaminating touch of urban culture. And in art-world mythology there is Gauguin in the South Seas, Van Gogh in his madness, Jackson Pollock, Jean-Michel Basquiat--gifted painters whose accomplishments have too often been viewed through the distorting prism of biography and anecdote, hence misunderstood by the public at large (and by art-world people who should know better).
       Because of the choices von Tiesenhausen has made in life--very sensible ones, they’ve always seemed to me--his remarkable work is forever in danger of superficial dismissal as escapist “back-to-nature” art. I believe it is no such thing, but I know that some viewers regard it as such. Careful looking at his painting and sculpture banishes such illusions--though long experience with art and its audience has taught me that mindful attention is one virtue gallery-goers are notably short on.

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       The case for Von Tiesenhausen’s art is hardly helped by the fact that his painting does not suit the fashionable stylistic tastes of our era, which run to the cool, detached and intellectual, and to the odd and bitter. But rightly understood, the painting and sculpture he makes--the complex truth of its imagery, its deeply expressive, intelligent manner--frustrates urban quests for some à la mode Noble Savage by opening continually toward the history of art, and by resuming the energetic struggle for meaning that informs all art that matters.
       The material forms of the artist’s work of imagination are drawn from rural Alberta: von Tiesenhausen paints what he sees--the land, the forests and sky--and often the mysterious things he makes, such as the boat-shaped figures he sculpts from branches and withes. We sense immediately that the lonesome tree in Lesson 1 (2007) is something the artist has seen and contemplated in its real-world setting. Yet even as this painting engages us by its exuberant brushwork and haunting melancholy, the imagery deflects our attention outward from Alberta, into the great unfinished project of European Romanticism, especially its German variant, and the inexhaustible treasury of visual ideas to be found there.
       Von Tiesenhausen’s dialogue with Romantic landscape art is hardly a search for images or mannerisms to imitate. The conversation takes him past all that, and past the skin of well-established art history, to the still-beating spiritual heart of Romanticism--its rejection of the picturesque and the sublime, for example, its embrace of feeling and sensibility, the belief that only in being absolutely true to one’s emotional apprehension of nature can the artist hope to make compelling art.
       To be faithful to such convictions demands keen awareness and observation of what nature is, and what it has become in the modern world. For the German Romantics of the early nineteenth century, nature was the refuge of spiritual unities and certainties being threatened across Europe by the Revolution in France and its violent aftermath of continental war. So it is for von Tiesenhausen, though the face of the enemy is now different. It is the will to dominate and exploit the earth, the tremendous force let loose against nature by the Industrial Revolution, the reduction of nature to standing reserve, useful to the extent that it feeds the hungers of distant cities for energy and raw materials. 
       But there is more in the Romantic vision of the artist and his work: The painter and sculptor must also bring to his creative work the ambition (in the words of the painter and radical theorist Philipp Otto Runge) “to convey to others, through words, signs, or whatever else might serve, something of the feeling which in my best hours animates me with a serene and stirring life.” Von Tiesenhausen’s painting and sculpture fulfill this ambition, and make new and vital the historic aims of Romanticism for this new century.

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       Lesson 2 (2007): Another lone tree in a blasted field, under a threatening sky: another emblem of flourishing survival in a landscape ravaged by the forces of industrialization. While the explicit danger represented here comes from resource exploitation, every force now desolating the spiritual life of humankind is symbolized: mass media, militarism and consumerism, the destructive idea that the essential human relationship with nature, within nature, is one of dominion and devastation.
       Yet there is something new in this iconic picture: the figure of a man standing at the foot of the tree. Such human figures, which frequently appear in von Tiesenhausen’s painting, are never portraits. They are usually painted in silhouette, and they serve a general symbolic purpose: to mark what von Tiesenhausen believes is the desirable task of human being--especially, I believe, that of the artist-- within the world.
       That task is to be a watcher, in the several senses of this word suggested by Lesson 2. He (the figure is always male) is an attentive, engaged observer standing still and looking straight ahead, rather than moving against nature in an act of violation; a witness to the threatened truth of nature, declaring his solidarity with the death-defying tree; but, most important of all, a vigilant protector of what is menaced. The watcher in Lesson 2 stands in front of the tree as its defender, but more than that: a witness who is there, standing on the scarred front lines of the conflict between humanity and nature, not enjoying the sight of the surviving tree from the safety of the sidelines. 
       We have seen such watchers before, in the charged landscape canvases of the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. The art historian Hugh Honour writes of Friedrich’s human figures--though he could have been speaking of von Tiesenhausen’s--: “Motionless, isolated, they seem to be both within and yet somehow outside nature, at once at home in it and estranged--symbols of ambiguity and alienation.” Friedrich believed, Honour reminds us, that art is the “mediator between nature and mankind,” and the generalized human figures in his painting--their backs turned toward us, directing the viewer’s gaze toward the natural topic--indicate the regard, the piety and anonymity, that is proper to the human relationship to nature: intent and grateful, unsleeping, fully awake and aware.

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       We have also seen these watchers in von Tiesenhausen’s work outside of painting, in the group of five statues to which he has given that very name. Hacked from spruce logs some years ago, torched and taken by the artist on an extraordinary journey through all Canada’s provinces and territories, each of The Watchers is an eight-foot, charred sculpture of a nude male: every man as he is without apparel, that is, without the inevitably definitive trappings and signals of culture.
       Man as he is, then; but also man as he should be: In the countless photographs von Tiesenhausen took during the voyage of The Watchers, the statues are never centres of attention. Rather, they stand in the natural expanse--on an icy, rocky outcrop in the Arctic, a cliff-top beside the Atlantic Ocean, the deck of a ship making its way through the Northwest Passage--as sentinels, appearing to observe, with immense and vigilant calm, environments we know are endangered by the acts of exploiting humankind.
       But is watching really humanity’s most desirable relationship to nature? Asked about contemporary environmental activism, von Tiesenhausen would say he believes it is a good thing. Many people nowadays, including the present writer, would agree with him. But the artist’s paintings and sculptures deliver a different message, one more quietistic, pacific, and more metaphysical than politically programmatic. 
       In the art itself, as opposed to whatever the artist might say about it or anything else, the artistic pedigree that stretches backward from Alberta to German Romanticism is very evident. Like the Romantic painters--I am thinking here especially of Friedrich--von Tiesenhausen is working in full consciousness of the devastating effects of most modern attempts to free humankind from lack, oppression, the burdens of history. The violent efforts in France to subjugate nature and society to instrumental reason weighed heavily on Friedrich’s mind, and no more anti-utopian painter has ever handled a brush.
       Similarly, von Tiesenhausen has come of creative age at a time when the full, lurid effects of the Industrial Revolution have finally become obvious to the millions; and, like Friedrich, he has made an art of resistance to those furious energies. But, as von Tiesenhausen intuits in his art, the modern war of the machines on nature is only the most recent instance of a perennial determination to conquer nature that goes back to the start of urban civilization, and that desire is what must be countered at all costs.
       The symbolism in von Tiesenhausen’s landscape painting and sculpture proposes one route for humankind beyond this dilemma. It is not the only one, surely--political action on the environmental front is a duty for many people in the present crisis--but it is possibly the most fruitful path forward for the contemporary artist and the thinker, for creators of the spiritual symbols and narratives our era needs so badly.
       Last Light (2007) is one of von Tiesenhausen most poignant recent meditations on the role of the artist, and the rest of us, in this urgent hour. The time is twilight--in all Western painting, the time of release from the worries and labours of the day, the time of prayer and recollection. Watchers stand on a snowy field, facing the unseen sun sinking in a clear western sky. They are arrayed in orderly lines: Crowding belongs to the urban day, the panic of exploitation and accumulation, not to contemplation’s rural dusk. Peace has come to the watchers, who celebrate the beauty and freedom of the sunset--the fact of nature least liable to human meddling, the supreme emblem of the freedom we, too, can attain--by observing the natural world in stillness.

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       But such a formulation of the visual ideas in von Tiesenhausen’s painting still begs some worrying questions. Along with watching, what does this art recommend we do? Human beings are essentially makers--it seems to be in our genetic chemistry--yet what can people make that does not merely project, all over again, the will to mastery over nature that is now putting the world at risk?
       Von Tiesenhausen offers an answer to these questions, I believe, in the stunning 2007 canvas entitled Cubits.
       It is a luminously ambiguous work. The time of day is indefinite--perhaps late on a cloudy afternoon--we cannot be sure. The line between ground and sky is hazy, and even the character of the ground is unclear: It could be mud, or snowy slush. One could argue that the atmosphere of the painting is tinted by sunset, or, just as plausibly, by the sulphurous fumes of industry. 
       Nor is it possible to tell exactly what is depicted by the boat-shape that dominates the picture. It could be a beached craft, though no water is nearby. It resembles one of the sculptural boat-forms von Tiesenhausen has often fashioned from twigs and branches cut from trees on his Alberta land--but it seems more solid, less transparent than they are. Nothing definitely indicates the scale of the object, which could be as large as a tanker or as small as rowboat.
       One thing the viewer can be certain about, however, is that here, as everywhere else in von Tiesenhausen’s painting, the symbolism of saving is front and centre. For the artist, the boat recalls the biblical Ark of Noah, which bore the remnants of humanity and the animal order through the world-devastating Flood.   Yet this painting’s ambiguity, its refusal to be a picture of the Ark pure and simple, encourages the imagination to range widely over art’s inventory of marine imagery. The medieval Barque of Peter is here, for example, rescuing souls from the sea of illusion and alienation from God, and the craft in Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa--the raft itself, of course, with its cargo of terrified, shipwrecked sailors clinging to life, but also the steamer, far off on the horizon, that will eventually save them. Whatever else it may be, Cubits is a painting that mines a very old vein of artistic tradition.
       Yet art history alone does not explain this complex picture, let alone exhaust its meanings. In fact, the busywork of teasing out the painting’s allusions and sources can tempt one to overlook the most obvious, elementary fact about it: The picture portrays and celebrates (by its powerful foregrounding) a product of human labour, imagination, skill that has long connoted the work of rescue. This is what we can do, the painting tells us; this is what we can make in the midst of a world in danger: a vessel of salvation.
       But, practically, what does this mean for those of us who are not ship-builders? For writers, surely, it entails telling whatever truth we have in the texts we create, and resisting the temptation to lend force to the exploitative, manipulative machinery of modern mass communications. For artists, it involves making work that speaks truthfully of the crises and prospects of humanity in its contemporary emergency. And for von Tiesenhausen, as we learn from his recent paintings, it means making art that points again and again to endangered nature and the forces endangering it, and that grounds in painted imagery the soul-nourishing beauties humankind is on the verge of losing forever. His work is an art of hope, for mankind and for the world.