THE TROUBLE WITH ARCADIA

"But when, at Zephyrs’ call, joyous Summer sends both sheep and goats to the glades and pastures, let us haste to the cool fields, as the morning-star begins to rise, while the day is young, while the grass is hoar, and the dew on the tender blade most sweet to the cattle."
-Virgil, Georgics Book III

In our current extended project we are trying to loosen the concept (and reality) of “Arcadia” from its unexamined niche in world history. While Virgil’s shepherds roamed in classical pastoral settings, Technology had already visited the fields and woods where they watched over their sheep, goats, or cattle. And by the time Nicolas Poussin painted his various scenes of Arcadian shepherds in the seventeenth century rural industry had modified the landscape even more extensively. Arcadia evolved as the construction of a privileged class of urbanites who longed for a simpler life in a primordial place. All they could do was recreate its appearance as they fancied–or wished–it had been.

The concept lingers into our age of highly advanced computational technology. It is from the deliberate perspective and using the protean tools of electronic culture that we are attempting to revisualize and reconstruct ancient Arcady.

There are two Arcadias: one real, the other virtual or, more accurately, ideal. It’s this one that gets all the good press, recurs in our collective (Western) dreams, is celebrated by the arts, and masks the truth about the first one. Pastures aren’t born, they’re made. And the effects of grazing can be extremely destructive to fields, streams, and forests. This is not the popular view.

Arcadia, a mountainous district in the Peloponesse, supplied the Greek timber industry from ancient times and, despite being the sacred domain of Pan, was the poorer for the exploitation of lumbermen and shepherds. In his most famous essay, “Et in Arcadia ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition,” Erwin Panofsky (referring to the writings of Polybius) describes it as, “a poor, bare, rocky, chilly country, devoid of all the amenities of life and scarcely affording food for a few meager goats.” This is not exactly what reading Virgil calls to mind. Panofsky explains that Virgil’s model derives from Theocritus who took inspiration for his Idylls from a more naturally fecund Sicily. In fairness to this bleak picture we’re drawing, John Bernard, a scholar of English pastoral poetry, and his wife, the writer Artis Bernard, having traveled recently in Arcadia, reported the landscape seemed actively pastoral and, to all appearances, healthy. As every eco-aware individual knows, however, appearances sometimes deceive.

Our position is that there is a problematic gap between images of ideal landscapes and the realities of actual human use–or abuse–of the land. The trouble is that the idealized image has great power; done well enough it can seduce us into taking–or mistaking–it for the real. Ansel Adams has been accused of producing just this effect with his grand and popular photographs of the West, i.e., a kind of false assurance, a preferred version of things. In our Arcadian Landscape series we try to destabilize this effect with visual and referential clues we hope might lead a viewer to reconsider the hyperreality of these highly constructed landscapes.

In 1994, an article on our work was published in the Dutch photography journal, Perspectief. The author– an English writer, Stephen Hobson –made what was for us a very provocative reference to Poussin’s “Arcadian Shepherds,” famous for the inscription, “Et in Arcadia ego” which appears on the tomb surrounded by four shepherds, one of whom kneels deciphering the text. In his article, Hobson awoke what we’ll call our highly dormant interest in Poussin.

The “Arcadian Shepherds” is an extraordinary painting. If you’ve not seen it, we’d like you to take our word for that unqualified observation. An impressive body of critical writing has evolved around the painting, most well known of which is Panofsky’s essay. What strikes us as extraordinary about all the writing is the nearly complete absence of comment about the landscape. Yet the landscape is meant to be more than mere scenery; after all, it is Arcadia where one might dwell in a state of perfect, eternal bliss. All attention of the four shepherds reflects inward on the meaning of the inscription. The tomb with its enigmatic inscription takes up perhaps one-fifth of the canvas area, but it effectively displaces the landscape from our vision. Arcadia in this work is taken for granted as a distant horizon to the melancholy fact of human mortality.

Shall we assume then that Arcadia itself is eternal in this representation? Apparently so, but only as a virtual topography, that is, as a poetic construction. Nature, however, is as mortal as we are–a fact more widely understood now than ever before. Still the seduction of Arcadia, a virtual and perfect nature, persists in its power to quiet our fears over Nature’s loss.

 

Suzanne Bloom and Ed Hill, known collectively as MANUAL, contemplate the vicissitudes of Nature and Cyberculture in their electronic studios in Vershire, VT, and Houston, TX (where both have been professors of art since 1976). For the last two years they have maintained a website for digital imaging, DIF (www.art.uh.edu/dif).