Fom Bambi kitsch to goat pavilions, a weird trip to the countryside
The Land We Live In – the Land We Left Behind
Acompost heap in the corner of a gallery. A coat made from apples. A pair of sandals owned by Edward Carpenter, the Victorian socialist who declared that shoes were a “leather prison” for the toes.
These are just a handful of the hundred or so exhibits in The Land We Live In – the Land We Left Behind,
a dense but dazzling new show at Durslade Farm in Bruton, the Somerset outpost of the international commercial gallery Hauser & Wirth.
Imagine a table at a harvest festival, piled high with superabundant produce. This is the effect of The Land We Live In, except, in place of marrows and gigantic pumpkins, we find a cornucopia of ideas. Alongside the weird, the wonderful, and the plain woeful (a thoroughly nauseous kitsch pastoral scene featuring Bambi, by the popular American painter Thomas Kinkade), there is even some “proper” art: a landscape by Paul Nash, a tapestry designed by Henry Moore, a resplendent 17th-century still life by the Flemish painter Jacob van Hulsdonck.
In the same gallery as the latter, we also encounter “anthropomorphic allegories” of the four seasons, by the 16th-century Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo: large, eccentric heads, composed from fruit and plants.
Here, they become emblems for this patchwork, plethoric exhibition, which takes its title from a wistful émigré toast traditionally raised by Irish-americans.
How can we cut a path through such a tangled thicket of material? Leading the way is the show’s guest curator, Adam Sutherland, the director of Grizedale Arts, an organisation in the Lake District.
Hauser & Wirth approached Sutherland last summer about curating an exhibition on the theme of “rural culture” – a subject obviously relevant for this effervescent place, which operates more like a warm public gallery for the West Country than a snooty commercial space.
Having grown up on a farm and worked in the countryside, Sutherland jumped at the chance, and swiftly began planning the exhibition equivalent of a brain dump: an idiosyncratic visual essay that is invigorating, but also, at times, hard to follow – and even a little nuts.
If there is an overarching thesis to his show, it is this: while many of us believe that the countryside is beautiful, we don’t tend to think of it as a generator of culture. Sutherland hopes to scotch this notion, by demonstrating that artists have often moved out of cities to form utopian rural retreats which, even if shortlived, became driving forces in our culture. Romanticism and the Arts and Crafts Movement provide two obvious examples.
Yet, while two of the five galleries contain archival displays, offering an overview of everything from 17th-century Diggers to the Scout Movement, it isn’t all historical.
Inside the Threshing Barn, Sutherland presents several installations by contemporary artists known for socially focused, processdriven work. Here, for instance, is a mobile cheese-making station by the Spanish artist Fernando García-dory, who is also responsible for the Goat Pavilion outside, a bespoke wooden climbing frame on which real goats will frolic for the duration of the exhibition. At least, that’s the plan, but, goats being goats, who knows what will happen?
The final gallery explores different visions of how the countryside could be used in the future. There are lots of paperback novels and essays, which we are invited to read, and wall-sized reproductions of glossy magazine advertisements, tempting urban audiences with idealised rural vistas.
There are also several imposing haystacks, assembled by a local farmer, because, as Sutherland told me, scything has become “quite fashionable”.
I boarded my train back to the Big Smoke feeling befuddled but also thrilled, as though I had participated in some neo-pagan rustic revelry, whose ancient roots I sensed, powerfully, but did not fully understand.