It is as if no one had ever passed their hand over the landscape's hair. It is uncomforted and comfortless.

Theodor Adorno 1

Landscape is our ur-space of in-dwelling, or rather was the ur-space of our ancestors, for whom survival meant competence in the landscape, though for our early ancestors landscape was not already, as it is for us, a 'landscape', but was rather terrain. 'Landscape' is an on-going invention, one of many spaces as distinct from space. 2 'Landscape' mirrors the conception of nature in its historicity. That 'landscape' is an invention, a cultural construction, is evidenced by the transformation of unmediated experience of the landscape requisite to the conception of landscape as site of metaphor. As William K. Wimsatt notes with respect to the nature poetry of Romanticism:

We have, in short, a subject-simply considered, the nature of birds and trees and streams-a metaphysics of an animating principle, a special sensibility, and a theory of poetic imagination . . . .3

That the conventions of representation of landscape space is something to be thematized, something to be regarded at this time might seem surprising. It should not. Landscape space is a part of our founding conception of spatiality. 'Landscape' as a motif is recently not often explicitly referenced. But as Hermann Albert suggested while looking at the landscape of the Tuscan countryside:

We stood there, with our own consciousness, looking at this dramatic spectacle, and suddenly one of us said "Its a pity you can't paint that anymore these days." That had been a key word I'd heard ever since I started to be a painter. And I said to him, out of pure impudence: Why can't you? You can do everything." 6

The first eleven works in the exhibition are collages from cut paintings on paper, while the remaining eight works are collages of cut paper from printed sources. With only occasional exceptions, such as 13 with its image of a dog and landscape elements, any antecedent image on the paper is largely avoided and incidental when it can be discerned. 7 Wilder's practice of cutting and inlaying the shapes of paper together in the manner of intarsia asserts the single plane the shapes physically occupy. This physical representation of planarity is in contrast to the painterly visual texture of the paper surface. More, the act of inlaying the shapes occludes the underlying shape onto which the collaged element is inlaid producing a substitute 'ground' as the figure occludes the ground. This is fundamental to the operation of collage, as Rosalind Krauss notes:

For it is the affixing of the collage piece, one plane set down on another, that is the center of collage as a signifying system. That plane, glued to its support, enters the work as the literalization of depth, actually resting "in front of" or "on top of" the field or element it now partially obscures. But this very act of literalization opens up the field of collage to the play of representation. For the supporting ground that is obscured by the affixed plane resurfaces in a miniaturized facsimile in the collage element itself. The collage element obscures the master plane only to represent that plane in a form of depiction. If the element is the literalization of figure against field, it is so as a figure of the field it must literally occlude.

The collage element as a discrete plane is a bounded figure; but as such it is a figure of a bounded field-a figure of the very bounded field which it enters the ensemble only to obscure. The field is thus constituted inside itself as a figure of its own absence, an index of a material presence now literally rendered invisible. 8

The inlaid, collaged shapes in Wilder's works tend to a loose correlation to the evoked landscape elements, which is to say that Wilder's is a 'painterly' approach to collage, even though the cutting and fitting of the individual collaged elements is precisely controlled. What is of considerable moment in Wilder's works is how minimal the visual cues need be to elicit a viewer response of closure of the spatial relations within the representation of landscape. The limit case, not evidenced as such but rather subsumed within the compositional structures of these works, is perhaps a division of the visual field into an upper and a lower register by a boundary serving to imply a horizon, dividing the field into spatial zones of bottom-foreground-proximal and top-sky-distal. A light-dark boundary, as in the horizontal edge in 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11, suffices. From this minimal compositional cutting of the field into two figures with a single line, Wilder introduces additional elements, complicating the constructed virtual space within the visual field. These additional elements, consisting in relatively small rather curvilinear shapes, have the effect of fragmenting the landscape into a field of separate planes. This fragmentation is not, for the most part, a matter of analyzing volumes into faceted forms constructed from abutting shapes edge to edge; though Wilder's collage elements are abutted edge to edge, the effect is rather that of a three dimensional field of planes.

The component elements within these collages tend toward a determinate spatial position, though their underlying origin as shapes cut from paintings-and thus the tactile painterliness of their surface as well as the 'painterliness' of the approximation of the particular shape to its referent-conduces toward a pushing and pulling in depth. In its liveliness, the perceptual space thus enacted has affinities with the space of Hans Hoffmann's paintings, 9 though in Wilder's collages an additional level of tension is enacted by the relation between the shape qua signifier as such and its signification within the gestalt of the landscape. The meandering line at the contour of the inlaid shapes sets up a spatial ambiguity in which the implied planes can be read as alternatively in front of or behind each other. Thus in 4 the space reads despite a relative paucity of cues, or alternatively regarded, one's strong propensity to read the space as rational-to attain closure efficiently-overwhelms such spatial contradictions as obtain. Nevertheless, a degree of tension between spatially contradictory and rationally coherent reading remains. In 4, the implied overlap of the vertical brown linear element near the image center thrusts the element in front of the overlapped area which conversely is pushed back spatially, but the broken area of relatively light value to the right of the center of the image otherwise asserts a spatial continuity with the similar passage to the left not withstanding the right area's overlapping of the brown linear form. The matter is further complicated by the oppositional terms of warm-cool and light-dark color as spatial signifiers, not always in accord with conventional expectations.

So also the 'framing' of the image with a collaged 'frame' or 'mat' within the physical frame serves both to provide a repoussoir pushing back the enclosed image and as an embedding image element, so that the image itself is seen as embedded:10 as it were, an image within an image, a representation of representation. This is Stephen Wilder's achievement in these collages: more than to evoke the sense of landscape space with but cut shapes of paper, precisely configured, to make visible the means by which space is evoked. To do this is to provide more than the pleasure of seeing what is to be seen, but the astonishment of seeing itself, which is the piercing of the seeming transparency of seeing to reveal a seeing of seeing: the blind look of seeing oneself seeing.1111">

Stephen Wilder is Emeritus Professor of Art, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, though he has returned to teach at Southern Methodist University this semester. Recent exhibitions include: Stephen Wilder: Collages, Mildred Hawn Gallery, Southern Methodist University, 1999; Stephen Wilder and David Dreyer: Paintings from the Landscape, Hickory Street Gallery, Dallas, Texas, 1997; 20 X 500: Views From a Dallas Warehouse, 500X, Dallas, Texas, 1999; and Stephen Wilder: Paintings and Drawings, Conduit Gallery, Dallas, Texas, 1991.

1. Theodor Adorno, Aphorism 28, Minima Moralia, (London: Verso, 1997 [1974]), p. 48. Return
   
2. Elisabeth Ströker, Investigations in Philosophy of Space, trans. Algis Mickunas (Athens: University of Ohio Press, 1987), p. 2; Ströker's distinction of 'spaces' and 'space' is analogous to Heidegger's ontological distinction. Return
   
3. William K. Wimsatt, "The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery," The Verbal Icon (Louisville: University of Kentucky Press, 1954); reprinted in ed. Harold Bloom, Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism (New York: Norton, 1970), pp. 77-88. Return
   
4. See Vincent Scully's magisterial classic, The Earth the Temple and the Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture (New York: Praeger, 1969). Return
   
5. I cite the medieval period deliberately, and within it one must particularly note Francesco Petrarca's account of his ascent of Mount Ventoux in Avignon, his opening of Augustine's Confessions while on the summit (in the manner of performing a sortes Virgiliana) and his eye fixing on the passage in the tenth chapter: "and men go forth, and admire lofty mountains and broad seas and roaring torrents, and the ocean, and the course of the stars, and forget their own selves while doing so." The ascent adumbrates a Renaissance conception of nature; the reaction of closing the book and saying no more to his companions a yet medieval fear of nature. Nevertheless, the effect of experiencing the landscape was extensive and profound for Petrarch; see Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of Renaissance Italy (New York: Random House, 1954), pp. 220-221; cf. Kenneth Clark, Landscape Into Art (London: John Murray, 1949, 1976), pp. 10-13. Petrarch's account of his Mount Ventoux ascent is found in his letter To Dionisio da Borgo San Seplcro [available online http://history.hanover.edu/early/petrarch/pet17.htm] and his dialogue Secretum [1342-43; revised 1353]. Return
   
6. Hermann Albert, quoted in T. Krens, M. Govan, J. Thompson, eds., Refigured Painting: The German Image: 1960-1988, exhibition catalogue (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Munich: Prestal Verlag, 1989), p. 252; quoted in Arthur C. Danto, "Art After the End of Art," Artforum 31:8 (April 1993), pp. 62-69. Return
   
7. Source material in collage can however be significant. See David Cottington, "What the Papers Say: Politics and Ideology in Picasso's Collages of1912," Art Journal 47:4 (Winter 1984), pp. 350-359; Patricia D. Leighten, "Picasso's Collages and the Threat of War, 1912-1913," Art Bulletin 67:4 (December 1985), pp. 653-672; Christine Poggi, "Frames of Reference: 'Table' and "Tableau' in Picasso's Collages and Constructions," Art Journal 47:4 (Winter 1988), pp. 311-322. Return
   
8. Rosalind Krauss, "In the Name of Picasso," The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1985), pp. 23-40. Return
   
9. On Hoffmann's spatial effects, see inter alia William V. Dunning, Changing Images of Pictorial Space: A History of Spatial Illusion in Painting (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991), pp. 160-169. Return
   
10. For the notion of an embedded image, see Norman Bryson, Mieke Bal, "Semiotics and Art History," Art Bulletin 73:2 (June 1991),174-208. Return
    
11. Reference is to Octavio Paz, "Más allá de amor," Octavio Paz: Early Poems 1935-1955 (San Franciso: New Directions, 1963), pp. 20-23, lines 6-7: "la conciencia, la transparencia traspasada, / la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar;" "consciousness, transparency pierced through / the look blinded by seeing itself looking." Return