Objects in the Panorama are Closer than they Appear
Objects in the Panorama are Closer than they Appear: Landscape, Illusion and the Mesdag Panorama
Andrew Czink, 2007
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the panorama painting was the height of the illusory immersive experience. Since the Renaissance and through the Enlightenment the visual had been increasingly privileged as a locus of knowledge. Vision became equated with knowledge. The economic and political agendas of Europe’s colonial powers fuelled the development of increasing realism in painting, particularly in the medium of landscape. Realistic representations of landscape were in increasing demand to show the populace not only what distant lands had been occupied and controlled, but also to show their own country in a way that would solidify and nurture the appreciation of national values. Realistic visual representations allow the viewer, in a sense, to ‘possess’ what they see: to control and to ‘own’ it. The visual perspective distances the viewer from the object and allows for a level of objectification unique to the visual experience. These landscape images constructed how people saw the land and therefore determined their relationship to the land.
The panorama develops the illusory visual representation of space further into an immersive experience by surrounding the viewer with a 360° circular painting rendered with realistic perspective. The rise of the bourgeoisie and the expansion of industry provided a large target market for this new, and ostensibly first, mass medium and so the panorama flourished. Early panoramas were mostly concerned with the illusory nature of the experience: they were intended as commercial forms of entertainment first and foremost. Concerns about fine art were put on the back burner during the initial phase of panorama construction in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As the expenses associated with panorama dropped (by standardizing formats for example), the lower cost of entry allowed a larger audience to view panoramas and drove the ‘second wave’ of interest in the later nineteenth century. It was at this point in time, and after the invention of photography, that fine art concerns were brought increasingly to the foreground in the creation of panorama paintings. This was required both to legitimize the panorama painting to draw people in for its intrinsic artistic value, and to foreground that value in opposition to the mechanically produced images of photography. While the requirement of maintaining a profit margin was still crucial to the continued production of panoramas, the more commercial entertainment factor was played down in deference to the artistic value of the experience as a strategy for attracting paying viewers.
Throughout the history of the panorama are accounts of viewers experiencing vertigo and disorientation. This continued well beyond the early days of panorama where one could argue that the audience for panorama hadn’t yet ‘learned’ to view them. I suggest that the immersive illusory aspect of the panorama is responsible for this. There is a disjunction between the visually oriented illusion of perspective which marginalizes the other senses, and the immersive 360° experience of the panorama which unwittingly invites the other senses back in. Our bodily knowledge of the architectural space of the panorama understands that the objects depicted in the painting are much closer than they appear. While the illusion of perspective and the concealment of the traditional frame and source of light tells our visual sense that we are looking at distant objects, our bodies understand that these objects are no further than the canvas. While it would seem that producing sensations of vertigo in our audience would drive them away rather than entice them in, I believe that people are drawn to experiences outside of the norm, even if only in very safe and prescribed circumstances. The panorama was a way of bringing a more visceral experience to people who may have lived controlled lives constrained by the requirements of urban society. This may constitute a disruptive or de-centering force and may explain to some degree why our society has an ongoing obsession with immersive phenomena and art forms. The increasing alienation of city dwellers from industry and capitalism even as they were immersed in the realities of urban life, drew them to artistic productions and spectacles to, at least vicariously, experience the disruptive forces of the creative imagination.
We will investigate these issues through Mesdag’s Panorama of Scheveningen. The paper will begin with a brief biographical account of Mesdag and continue to an examination of the impetus for the Scheveningen panorama. I will show that the choice of landscape as the subject matter was not accidental and ties in both with Mesdag’s own personal agenda as a businessman and artist, and the cultural role of landscape painting as a genre. The interest in producing a panorama can be seen as an interest in the disruptive impulse in art. We will look at Nietzsche’s notion of the Dionysian impulse, at Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on the primacy of perception, and at Deleuze and Guattaris’ ideas of smooth and striated space. The paper will conclude with the suggestion that illusory forms of art may be seen as a form of prosthetic device, extending our reach and control: perhaps a reason for our ongoing impulse to simulate.
Hendrik Willem Mesdag was born in Groningen in 1831 and passed away in 1915 in The Hague. He received drawing lessons as a child. In 1856 he married Sientje van Houten who was instrumental in the production of the Scheveningen panorama, painting significant part of it herself and organizing much of the production work. In 1861 while working as a banker, Mesdag was accepted as a pupil at the Academy Minerva in Groningen. He was a committed amateur painter until 1866 when he ended his banking career to become a professional painter. He did continue to deal in real estate for the rest of his life, maintaining his business ties without having the daily responsibilities he had at the bank. Mesdag discovered his ‘main theme’ during a summer spent in Norderney, an island off the North Sea. He obsessed on sea and landscapes from this point on.
Mesdag moved to The Hague in 1869 where he was admitted to the Pulchri Studio Painters’ Society and the following year received a gold medal at the Paris Salon (beating out Courbet who also painted a seascape!). This is the first in a long list of medals and honours that he received at numerous salons throughout his life. Mesdag relentlessly pursued these sorts of honours to establish himself as a ‘serious’ artist. There had been some critical commentary about his amateur status from colleagues in his earlier days: there seemed to be some sense of mistrust of the banker-turned-painter. It may have seemed a bit far-fetched to some.
The painting of the Scheveningen panorama was not Mesdag’s idea. He was approached to do the job in 1881 by a publicly traded panorama company based in Brussels. The panorama had been mostly considered a form of mass entertainment and was often scoffed at by established artists. There hadn’t been many panoramas that aspired to the status of art. Mesdag was intrigued by the idea and accepted the commission. Unusually for a panorama commission he was given free reign to choose both his subject matter as well as his team. He chose a team of six, including his wife, to assist with the project. Because of the heavily commercialized nature of panorama production at that point in history, Mesdag and his team had a very tight timeline to complete the project. Panorama production had set standard dimensions for the canvases to streamline production, cut costs and allow the generation of additional revenue by having the canvas travel to other standard sized venues around Europe (and occasionally North America). The painting is 14.7 metres high and 114.7 metres in circumference: the industry standard. The company required him to complete the painting in the space of three months. This worked out to a production schedule requiring that they paint an average of sixteen square metres of canvas per day!
The image is of a view from the Semaphore Dune in Sheveningen, showing the town and beach area with fishing boats. The viewing platform simulates a beach gazebo on the dune with faux terrain made up of sand, maram grass, fishing nets, folding chairs etc to bring the viewer to the canvas through a three dimensional foreground. Natural light enters through a skylight roof (which remains hidden from spectators’ view) in the rotunda. The image clearly shows both the fisherman working and their quarters as well as those of the boat owners. There has been criticism of the piece because it doesn’t depict the tensions that were ongoing between the workers and the owners.
Mesdag’s choice of subject matter for the panorama is somewhat unusual. The fashion at the time for panorama imagery was mostly either battle scenes or landscapes of exotic locations. Mesdag’s choice of a local landscape could be seen as a poor business decision, which it in fact was. The panorama was not financially successful and Mesdag bought the panorama back from the company three years later and funded it from his real estate dealings from then on.
So why a local landscape? It certainly was Mesdag’s area of specialty, particularly when including the sea, so we know that he had a personal/artistic reason to do so. Mesdag was also interested in the issue of creating illusions and felt that a landscape lent itself to creating illusion much better than battle scenes and cityscapes. This was not an unknown concept as Yvonne van Eekelen points out that,
…the correspondent of the German Kunstblatt, visiting Paris, notes that Pierre Prevost, creator of the panorama of Athens, ought not to have placed so many figures in the foreground. In so doing, he drew too much attention to the immobility of his painting, which for the rest was highly realistic. The Dictionnaire des Beaux Arts of 1806 even advised against the inclusion of moving figures. A sweeping landscape, according to the Dictionnaire, was much more suitable as a panoramic subject than a town or a battle.
Landscape painting as a genre, of course, was not only popular, but also unquestionably rooted in the fine arts. Landscape imagery was important in the constitution of the West’s notions of land use, ownership and colonialism. Malcolm Andrew’s states that:
…landscape…is mediated land, land that has been aesthetically processed….landscape…as an idea and as an experience in which we are creatively involved, whether or not we are practicing artists…we are not passive consumers of landscape images. Our sense of our own identity and relationship to our environment is implicated in our response to such pictures…. Landscape in art tells us, or asks us to think about, where we belong. Important issues of identity and orientation are inseparable from the reading of meanings and the eliciting of pleasure from landscape.
Notions of the sublime, of nature vs. culture, the intact vs. the cultivated also figure into landscape imagery. “Landscape establishes a ground for the extended sharing of social attitudes and patterns of social behavior….” Regarding the developing interest in landscape painting during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Mark Roskill further states that:
The extraordinary rise in the appreciation of natural scenery that took place…is linked, philosophically, to a growing cult of the wild and of nature in all of its variety, which visual images helped to propagate. It is linked, socially, to the expansion of travel that improved means of transportation made possible. Intellectually, it draws upon the growth of natural science, as it encompassed the directly relevant fields of botany, geology, and zoology. It is also related to growing improvements in the use and cultivation of land.
Jay Appleton in his book The Experience of Landscape, has developed a biologically informed theory of landscape which he refers to as the
…prospect-refuge theory [which he defines as] the theory that the ability to see without being seen is conducive to the exploitation of environmental conditions favourable to biological survival and is therefore a source of pleasure.
Appleton analyzes landscape imagery in several disciplines and points out how they are “…essential to an understanding of landscape as a strategic theatre for biological survival.”
These may all be factors in the choice of subject matter for Mesdag’s panorama, but most likely for him, at an emotional level at least, his panorama “…reveals a deep-seated lingering desire for a classical, objective viewpoint.” Consciously he may have been more interested in having his panorama function as “…a public demonstration of the artistic qualities in which the Hague School excelled.” Mesdag was very conscious of his amateur status and seemed to often be motivated by the need to prove himself to his fellow painters. This would speak to his stated interest in creating fine art, even in the context of the popular form of the panorama. Mesdag seemed to have an ally in the writer Carel Vosmaer who wrote a review/preview of the panorama alerting the potential audience to the good reasons to experience Mesdag’s panorama. Leeman quotes Vosmaer drawing attention to the potential audience’s experience of the panorama in comparison to the ‘real’ view down the road, saying:
How many have examined it the way a painter sees it, studying the light and shade effects, savouring the splendour of the surroundings, observing the colours and tonal relationship?… All this has now been done by an artist; through his art he has interpreted what lies open in nature for one and all to see, summarized it, rendered it accessible to those who were not yet heedful of it… Yes, it was there, but unless our own artistic sensibility has been sufficiently refined, it takes the hand of artists to allow us to enjoy what is present in nature.
So, while the illusionistic aspect of the painting was certainly present, it was not Mesdag’s primary consideration: it was a given. He was concerned about ‘raising’ the lowly panorama to high art, no doubt because of the rapid ascendancy of photographic media as well as his need to prove himself as a ‘professional’ artist of the highest caliber. He likely saw the choice of the local Scheveningen landscape as the representation and preservation of the “…symbolic form of an ideal world.” Mesdag’s focus on the landscape may have been to “…achieve the annexation of nature,…in the service of the self and as a site of self-realization.”
The question of why Mesdag agreed to paint a panorama is still troubling. I suspect that Mesdag understood that the more convincing the illusion, the more convincing the production of space in the finished work. The tradition of Western perspective and realism was one which offered a privileged point of view, where all the elements of monocular perspective converged for the viewer. The panorama, by surrounding the viewer, dislodges the primacy of the privileged view. Now several people may view the work, each with a unique and equally valid view. Perhaps the rise of democracy in Western nations required a form that gave at least the illusion of personal freedom.
Landscape painting though, developed from an increasingly visual bias, where vision was equated with knowledge. To see, was to know, to grasp and control. The other senses were marginalized. Our experience of landscape through paintings became a sanitized experience to some degree. Optical experience was emphasized over the haptic: the bodily ‘feel’ or knowledge of experience was reduced to the visual. The landscape painting was also a very striated experience of space through the intricate structuring grid of monocular perspective.
The 360° immersive experience of the panorama transgressed all of this, even if somewhat unwittingly. It developed out of the tradition of landscape painting with its bias towards the optical, visual experience. By surrounding the viewer and by concealing the typical grounding reference of the frame, the viewer has been set adrift in a sea of contradictory haptic experience. Without the anchor of a frame the viewer tries to orient him or herself allowing the other senses to invade and inform the experience in an attempt to become grounded. The initial experience of walking into a panorama may be a very smooth one which eventually becomes increasingly striated as we get our bearings. Deleuze and Guattari’s account regarding the smoothness of close-up vision vs. the striation of distant vision is compelling. They say:
It seems to us that the Smooth is both the object of a close vision par excellence and the element of a haptic space (which may be as much visual or auditory as tactile). The Striated, on the contrary, relates to a more distant vision and a more optical space – although the eye in turn is not the only organ to have this capacity…. Cezanne spoke of the need to no longer see the wheat field, to be too close to it, to lose oneself without landmarks in smooth space. Afterward, striation can emerge: drawing, strata, the earth, ‘stubborn geometry,’ the ‘measure of the world,’ ‘geological foundations,’ ‘everything falls straight down’…The striated itself may in turn disappear in a ‘catastrophe,’ opening the way for a new smooth space, and another striated space….
Even historically, viewers have been aware of this disjunction. Early critics of the panorama pointed out:
The inability of the panorama to transport transitory events and sounds, that is, a perfect illusion, results…in a confusing conflict between ‘appearance’ and ‘truth’ that can even cause physical indisposition: ‘I sway between reality and unreality, between nature and non-nature, between truth and appearance. My thoughts and my spirits are set in motion, forced to swing from side to side, like going round in circles or being rocked in a boat. I can only explain the dizziness and sickness that befall the unprepared observer of the panorama in this way.
Mark Doty, in a description of his experience of Mesdag’s panorama in the year 2000 corroborates aspects of the previous account:
The ‘world’ around you is a work of art, and you are its center. That center is strangely, unnervingly unstable, because every way you step your perspective changes a little. Not in the effortless way it does in the world outside; within this strange hothouse of a theatre there’s a disorienting little adjustment every time…I move…. A weird sense of being transported into an illusory space, like the dicey three-dimensionality of a stereopticon slide, or the fuzzy depths of a hologram. Something inescapably false about it….
Interestingly, landscape painting was never criticized for not being able to create a perfect illusion including ‘transitory events and sounds.’ But the overt illusionism of the immersive panorama and the contradictory nature of the experience invited this critical stance.
Our bodies ‘know’ that the visual illusion of perspective in a panorama is not ‘real.’ Our bodily experience of space informs us that the canvas is close and all of our senses work together to try to make the experience sensible. Merleau-Ponty spoke of the “primacy of perception,” stating that “I could not grasp the unity of the object without the mediation of bodily experience, [and that] I am my body as opposed to having a body.” To Merleau-Ponty there could be no possibility of a separation or gap between existence and embodiment: they were one and the same.
So why the “…impulse to simulate…?” Vattimo suggests that our pursuit of new technologies of representation and of new ways of experiencing the world through the creation of art can be traced back to Nietzsche’s notion of the ‘Dionysian impulse’ in humankind. Nietzsche proposes the “Apollonion and Dionysian duality,”as a tension between the optic, rational, reasonable and scientific with the haptic, irrational, emotional and aesthetic. He suggests that we ‘normally’ exist in the Apollonion realm where we are aware of, and respect, our roles in society: that our sense of ourselves as independent individuals is clearly understood. The Dionysian impulse on the other hand, propels us to transgress the very structures and concepts that we have created in our societies and by becoming “intoxicated” with experience itself (in what Merleau-Ponty would call a “pre-predicative” way) we lose our sense of individuality and become part of the ‘smooth’ space of the haptic. As Vattimo says: “…Nietzsche traces art, which rocks and unsettles the hegemonic linguistic-conceptual system, to the impulse to mask oneself and dissolve oneself into different appearances.”
There is therefore, an ongoing tension between the Dionysian and Apollonion, the optical and haptic, and the smooth and striated. Societal pressures in the West create vast economic and war machines to control, possess and expand the creation of wealth, while the individuals’ need to transgress social norms and restrictions is perhaps manifested in the creation of new forms of representations. Technologies of representation are equally fuelled or inspired by the needs of the military, government and global capital as by a need for transgressive experiences of the world. The technologies of control extend our ‘reach’ like a prosthetic device (microscope, telescope, radio-telescope, MRI, digital imaging, night vision, immersive gaming environments etc), while simultaneously allowing us to reach beyond the status quo and to reconstitute ourselves, producing new spaces of experience. The panorama painting ushered in an era of mass immersive media that continues today, not only with technologies of representation as mentioned above, but also by the wide popularity of ritualistic immersive experiences such as rock concerts and major sporting events, providing ever new way of experiencing the Dionysian dissolution of self.
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