Editor's Note:
Certain conceptual artists, most famously Hamish Fulton and Richard Long - contemporaries at London's St. Martin's School of Art in the Sixties - often take walks in remote places around the world then exhibit work related to the activity in galleries. The real art is the journey, the material in the gallery the evidence of it. Hamish Fulton and Julian Cooper met to talk about Julian's trip to Kailash and the paintings that he made as a result of the trip.
This is an edited version of the conversation.
Hamish Fulton:
I haven't been to Kailash yet but more than most mountains I think that Kailash seems to work on my mind. Maybe that's because it's both a reality and a symbol.
Julian Cooper:
I first saw it years ago in a reference book, Mountains of the World. It's a technical book with lots of little black and white photographs and it struck me then as this amazing thing with its four quite distinct faces. It's incredibly striking to look at. I later found out that it's a sacred object for Buddhists, Hindus and Jains, that it's the source of the four main rivers of Asia and that it's the highest example of conglomerate rock in the world. It seemed like everything rolled into one really. As a subject for me it was like a gift.
I saw just outside of Kathmandu a huge painting of Kailash. It was actually on hardboard or something and like a huge bill-board so even today it has this incredible significance for pilgrims. But the mountain came first, then they projected their ideas onto it.
When it was first encountered 5,000 years or so ago by tribes coming from India up onto the Tibetan plain, crossing a wilderness and seeing this thing they must have been in awe because it looks like an alien craft sitting there on this massive desert plain beside two lakes. It still has that mystic aspect in south Asia and pilgrims from all over Asia to go to it.
But climbing on Kang Rinpoche is forbidden isn't it?
Yes. The pilgrims walk around. It's called a kora, they go around it clockwise, unless you are Bon which is pre-Buddhist, and then you go anti-clockwise. It's actually very rare that you are able, anywhere in the world, to walk all the way around a big mountain and this was another aspect of its fascination for me, not being able to touching and the circumambulation.
So for this trip it was more to do with walking around it than climbing it as you usually do.
The whole idea really was to experience it like the pilgrims. I'd intended to spend a couple of nights at each of the faces to give me enough time to really study them, make a painting and take photographs. I'd planned to have eight days but there was a misunderstanding with the porters and guides and it ended up as six days. So on the first day, after arriving at Darchen on the south side, I went all the way to the north side, taking in the west face but not actually being able to paint it. You are too close in to see it flat on, but when I arrived at the north side after 10 hours of walking it was absolutely awesome.
The paintings give the impression that the mountain has a very singular character.
All the faces have different characters.The south face (pp. 9|10) is the key face for Buddhists, that's the face that's always represented. It's rounded with a feminine sort of character and strange horizontal terraces and gashes running up and down and this very white pyramid. The west face (p. 13) has a concave shape with these horizontal terraces and the north face (pp. 6|7 & 17|18) is a classic north face, a great big wall really that's broken up to the left with buttresses. I found it fascinating being there in the evening on the first day at Darchen. I'd gone over a pass to the south west and done a painting during the day, then in the evening I went up about a 1,000 ft. to get this full view of Kailash bathed in evening light. It was terrific. Later after I had done the kora we arrived back at the south face and I did a painting from the same spot (p.13). The west face though is just extraordinary, almost a manic shape zipping round and although you'd think that big convex ice cap would curve around from the south face and across the west face it just finishes in an ice cliff and the rock just sweeps around in this huge concave shape.
The mountain actually looks almost as if it's a built structure.
Yes, and I wanted to accentuate this and build it out of paint from the base of the canvas. That's what I imagined, remaking the mountain on the canvas, with all of it's overlapping realities and mythologies. Taking it from a naturalistic point of view, how it really was from a certain view-point at a certain time of day but taking it apart and re-building it on the canvas.
In Japan they have this idea of placing a single painting in an alcove. It's like an empty room with one painting in it. Seeing these pictures for the first time I'm wondering if you've ever thought of doing that.
That would be ideal for these paintings. They are similar to how religious objects might have been painted in the past, but actually using nature, so one painting with a devotional hallowed space around it would be wonderful. It's all to do with the symmetry and centrality of the image and the meeting of geology and religion.
I don't know how it works with the painting but the construction lines inside this painting (pp. 17|18) seem to be very much a part of it from the point of view of art.
About halfway through this one I felt the need to build a scaffolding of lines that got nearer together towards the top, an abstract version of the mountain in the paint, and I carried on and it helped me to structure the painting.
It's interesting that you have guide lines for building up a painting of a mountain.
I don't think I'd have done it if the mountain itself didn't have these natural strata lines running across it, particularly on the south face. It's like the tiers of Buddhist temples which were designed to be representations of Kailash. Unlike yourself I'm condemned to this laborious thing called painting practice that's very very similar to what was being done a 100 years ago. But I'm not so interested in subverting it, I'm interested in creating an awareness of different ways of looking at it that might be slightly new.
That's what really interests me about your work. I saw one or two of your paintings in an exhibition somewhere in Italy and was taken by the choice of the view, the selection of the shape. My first response was that this was something different and a bit new. They're not complete paintings of a whole view and that seemed like a major aspect. It goes towards abstraction but because part of the work is that it's got to be a recognisable mountain, it's between two positions really.
Yes, you throw away things like foreground, middle distance and background and start from scratch with the canvas as an object, a flat rectangular surface with paint on. I also quite like the idea of it being a topographical diagram as well as a painting, but the painting comes first. In reality mountain faces are far more subtle and complex and interesting than anything I could possibly invent so I'm finding my own way of painting a parallel thing to the reality. When I'm looking at reality certain things spring out because there's this template in my head that is already waiting for something to fit the bill, to crystallize, there's a solution there that will only take one drop of reality to suddenly crystallize into something exciting to paint. It's not to do just with being bowled over by the reality of what really is out there, it's the making of a painting of it that is so much more exciting to me.
That's a major point isn't because you're an artist and that's the activity of an artist.
I can sit for hours in front of a mountain. Can't you? It's to do with the complexity of it. It's not the same as looking at a view stretching for miles and miles, it's just this massive object. It's the process of deep time contained within a subject that is so complex that I can sit for hours reading it, taking it in and beginning to see possibilities for painting. I'm probably trying to borrow the authority of the mountain in a way, or get behind the mountain to make a painting.
The question of colour must be really important. You need to get the colour just right. I can imagine this colour actually on the mountain, with this intense light, Tibetan plateau light and I can imagine this as real rock.
The colour makes it feel real or not.
I've never done this before, talked to a painter about his work. In my own work I like everything absolutely black and white, a date a number a sign, but in front of your paintings I'm speaking in a different way because I'm attracted to the subject and to the paintings. It's a strange journey for me to be speaking like this because there aren't any words in nature, it is a kind of wordless experience but with your paintings I can imagine just being there.
Do you find being on your own a lot in mountains that you can understand the belief that locals have that there is a consciousness in the mountain? That they are alive in some strange sense and treating them as divinities or whatever.
Yes, and in contrast to the Christian history of being against nature, animate or inanimate. The question really is how you define life. The life of rock is completely bound up in everything, it's not living in the blood and heart and life span sense of the question but it is part of the whole living environment that's evolving the whole time.
I feel that too and what I want in the painting is to make the mountain look as though it's aware, that it has a life and is almost looking back at you.
That's what's great about art, there are so many possibilities. Because of the quantity and complexity of humans on the planet our rules become more and more dominant, rules that we've made ourselves or as a society or the economy, but I think art does offer that possibility to try something new and when you see something in painting that is taking up a new position it's important to recognise that. I think the sort of choices that you are making about what's not in the painting is a big part of how they work.
That's part of the point really, isn't it?
Yes, and who is to say which is the most important route for art to take. We keep hearing that 'this is a most important statement' or 'if you go this way you are going backwards' or 'if you go that way it's irrelevant', but what's important is creativity. As an old geezer now I think creativity is the thing, that people are creative. Which in turn means diversity.
Yes, and that could involve looking at past painting done hundreds of years ago. Knowing about the past is quite useful but a lot of art today is about just not wanting to know about past art and thinking it's totally irrelevant. Curators also seem to believe in this progression, that one thing led from another, impressionism then cubism and then this and that, they believe that that is the real history of art instead of a construct. Better not get into that now.
Did you approach Kailash from the south and see it perhaps like the early travellers from India would have first seen it.
I came more from the south-east and my first sight of it was from about 20 miles away and even then it looked amazing. From the south its this massive thing squatting there, there is no other white around it, because it's the only mountain high enough to be snow covered. It's got its own unforgettable aura. It gets quite literally into your whole being.
When people have been walking around it for more than 1,000 years it's bound to have an accumulated kind of aura. And also I think walking round it must be very different to say the religious experience of going indoors, inside a cathedral. And also it must be very different again for the people that go prostrating around Kailash and take weeks to do it.
When the full compliments of paintings are finished hopefully they will carry you around the mountain, one thing linking with another. That's what I'm hoping for. I also want it to feel as though it's just happened, just now. It's something I absorbed from the Tibetan version of Buddhism, the importance of now. I want it to feel like the mountain is perpetually happening as you look at it, as if it's just sprung up and formed itself, that it's risen from the base of the canvas and pushed the top of the rectangle up with it.
Yes. I quite like that place in the mind where it goes slightly stunned, as you stop momentarily to join the painting to that symbol in the imagination.
Yes. It's like when you look at a painting for the first few seconds, or fragments of a second, and if it works it thumps you in the pit of the stomach. If it's not doing that it doesn't work, it's not meant to be just a picture of something, it's meant to explode in your consciousness.
I liked a lot of what you were saying there but for me it's also the brush marks. You need to be able to look at a painting and not get stuck somewhere on the brush marks, they shouldn't become an obstacle.
It's important that each brush mark is dealt with positively. The brush mark is like an ego, a little bit of oneself doing something, but as a whole it should all come together so that each little impulse is subsumed to the whole.
And it's got to look like the mountain. It's really interesting because in my mind I can hear arguments against painting and so on. There's quite a lot of juggling going on in my mind but I think it's the mountain subject, it's completely absorbing, hypnotic.
Despite the fact that it's a painting?
Yes. This is the thing about art, the viewers must use their own imagination or there's nothing. You actually have to activate it yourself. I can look at that sunlit slope of snow and ice and in my imagination it's joining up into the experience of looking at a mountain. I've seen lots of other paintings of mountains but with the best will in the world I can't always relate to them. Or with no will in the world or whatever because it's to do with a whole range of attitudes and practices that I rejected when I was a student.
Well, having spent hours and hours just staring at the mountain and then trying to do a painting of it I'm probably regurgitating that experience of it without realising it. I'm very strongly believing in it, believing it as real.
What's interesting with this is that it is painting, but it's also some kind of hypnotism. And these Kailash paintings show more of the mountain than some others I've seen. Is that because Kailash is such a recognisable shape sitting there on the plateau.
Some mountains are crying out for a narrative series of paintings like the Eiger ones that traced climbing routes, but with this, the whole mountain is the home of Shiva and Parvati or whoever so you have to deal with the whole. I imagined that there might be a more detailed iconography of certain spurs or gullies or flanks with names or terms, like a cathedral, but I haven't so far found any.
I'm attracted to the idea that mountaineers have said that somehow a painting does more than a photograph. It shows more the spirit of the mountain. A photo' can record, but more often it's about how it was printed, about the technology, whereas the painting seems to be more about a recalling of the mountain experience.
That's what I've always believed and why I've continued to paint. I always sensed that there's so much more to do in painting; it hasn't all been done and in fact it's probably infinite. A lot of people at the moment think it's had its day but I think it's quite good for painting that it's in an emergency situation. We've had to engage with it and find new way with it.
I think that is what this kind of painting is about, it's like you have found a personal space to work in that doesn't correspond easily to another artist's activity. I've been reading about your work, the descriptions of verticality and the fall of paint coming down the canvas that can be seen as melting ice or icicles and because it's the surface of the canvas and the surface of the rock face and so on all those sorts of connections come to mind.
And just simple polarities of light and dark, thick paint thin paint, lit and shadowed, just simple things but when you add three or four different polarities, all meshing together in different permutations, that's enough. Paint is such fantastic stuff just to handle, to make something of, something simple like a mountain yet so complex, it's marvellous, it's rich.
Are these the paintings of abandoned quarries in the Lake District (pp. 23, 23|25 & 27)?
Yes they're scattered all over the Lakes. They're gradually mouldering away and quite dangerous with bits splitting off and I thought they were an interesting parallel subject because they are usually undercut with a cave underneath. They blast it away so it's the opposite of a mountain in a way.
I find these cave paintings much harder to relate to than the mountain ones that I'm completely drawn in to. I think I'm not familiar enough with this subject and for me they don't have the aura of the Kailash paintings.
I wasn't expecting to feel this aura. I was expecting to be able to treat it just as an interesting impressive mountain. But just being in Tibet with all the sorts of markers that they have all over the landscape, I began to realise that their religion is the landscape, it is actually formed by the landscape itself. There are markers and prayer flags on top of passes, mani stones, ancient areas of crag that you see in the distance; the whole place, the physical landscape is an open air cathedral I suppose.
Yes. Kailash or similar places in the Buddhist Himalaya work on you in a different way to a religion involving one God. We can sit in here in comfort and say that the power of Kailash is just rock and snow and ice but of course if you go to these places then there is actually something really working on you as a human being. You're under the power of it, the hypnosis of it and then you go further and then you're scared, it's frightening and there's a much more involving relationship that takes place.
That's what impressed me in a way that I hadn't quite expected in Tibet. You see people by the side of the road and there's no clear distinction between, what we call religion and just ordinary life, they are just living this life and it's very important to them that the reality of the present moment is celebrated despite their tremendous suffering.
In some ways I shouldn't be speaking in this way because there is so much human suffering going on in Tibet. But in our world we have gone inside, we're in this building, we're inside a city, we go into our fantasies. Whereas they live in this giant landscape and it's the influence of this huge space and when somebody smiles it's just unbelievable, their whole face lights up, it's a gift. Whereas in our culture creative people are onto a winning vein when they make art about self indulgent unhappiness. Which is not the same as the Buddhists saying 'all life is suffering', so how can we deal with it.
The Chinese authorities either don't understand this or see it and try and stamp out the last dying embers of it. They now see Buddhism as the thing to be stamped out, because it's the energy source against being squashed. It's the opposite of everything that this modern Chinese culture of totalitarianism and capitalism that has incredible world power, but it's the Tibetans who have got something we really need.
What we know is that the Chinese can use their forces or trading power to silence any opposition anywhere in the world. The Tibetan people, they have no material wealth whatsoever but they do have this huge mental strength, mental training. In Western art, our sense of power and control has recently produced a £50 million diamond skull, and at the other end of the scale there is the kind of human wealth that is Tibetan Buddhism. But the diamond skull was made in an un-repressed society, so long live contemporary art. Intentionally or unintentionally, all art is political,
Are these the pictures that you made out in the Tibetan landscape actually in front of Kailash (pp. 14, 15, 20 & 21)?
They are almost embarrassingly feeble really. You go with such high hopes. I went with about eight canvases and made five paintings in total but at that altitude I found it really difficult.
I really like them, I just think a painting is a painting, I'm not sure about this idea of a sketch for another painting. I just treat these the way I see them, with the patina of travel the human touch.
The instant I look at them I remember the reality; sitting there doing the things. That's good for me. I do them to engage with the mountain and feed lots and lots of information into my head which all seeps back into the paintings in the studio. Years ago I tried to do very big canvases high up in the Andes and went through tremendous difficulties to get them up there, but it didn't work, they blew away, blew around rocks and stuff. But I wanted the combination of studio painting, big painting, long considered paintings but made out in front of the subject and although it didn't work, when I look at them I'm immediately drawn back to being there. I sort of assumed that I would carry on finishing these off but I think now that it's best just to leave them and not make a big thing of just a means of production.
Recorded in London on
16 June 2007 and
edited
by
Michael Richardson
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