A country ramble like no other
Radical Landscapes Tate Liverpool
You could probably do with a blitz of green and pleasant right now. It’s been a long winter and few things are more rallying, but visit Radical Landscapes at Tate Liverpool expecting those comforts and I’m afraid you’ll leave disappointed. Yes, this rich and often superbly strange exhibition burrows hard into our connection to rural Britain. But it also reveals how, since about 1900, landscape art has been knocked from its traditionally pastoral, picturesque perch and used to fire conversations about diversity, nuclear war and land rights instead.
It could have easily become an exercise in box-ticking, but is made fascinating by its having dovetailed those political watchwords with archaeology, Wicker Man-type mysticism, the French Revolution, 1990s rave culture, Victorian botany and interwar youth movements such as the Kibbo Kift.
The direction of the exhibition is clearly signposted at the outset – with an actual signpost: Jeremy Deller’s 2019 pastiche of the instantly recognisable green, yellow and white British road sign. “A303”, it says, “Built by Immigrants.” Deller, who is British, made the irreverently toned work in response to a study published in 2019 that revealed some ancient parts of the route – and Stonehenge, which lies near it – had been built by descendants of Neolithic migrants from Anatolia.
You’ll also clock your first Constable (Flatford Mill, from 1816-17) on the far wall, though wall text explains how those quintessentially English landscapes ignore the reality of the Enclosure Acts then disenfranchising rural workers. Besides, the painting is dwarfed by Tina Keane’s In Our Hands, Greenham 1982-4: 12 televisions broadcasting footage of the historic peace protests in Berkshire.
The women’s singing and laughter trails affectingly into the next room, where Henry Moore’s 1965 bronze
Atom Piece, a seemingly celebratory metallic dome that morphs quickly into the helmet-like shape of a skull, is accompanied by a 1950 film offering advice for farmers in the event of nuclear fallout. A second Constable comes in the form of Peter Kennard’s
Haywain with Cruise Missiles
(1980), which pastes gleaming modern weaponry into the famous leafy Suffolk landscape.
Trespass is a key theme.
Right to roam campaigns of the 1920s are examined in a sequence of paintings, posters and ephemera, while in a clip from the landmark 1972 TV series Ways of Seeing, the critic John Berger castigates Gainsborough’s
1750 painting Mr and Mrs Andrews as a repugnant celebration of property: “Their attitude towards [their land] is visible. If a man stole a potato at that time he risked a public whipping. The sentence for poaching was deportation.”
And diversity is potently presented. I admired Ingrid Pollard’s 1989 series Oceans Apart
– a collection of hand-tinted, toned silver prints by the British artist that superficially resemble old-fashioned picture postcards and depict black Britons beside the sea. Also Double Grille (2008) by the Afro-caribbean painter Hurvin Anderson, which overlays a verdant landscape with a pattern inspired by security grilles in Jamaica.
Things go rather wrong, though, with the section on climate crisis, which just doesn’t fit with the story this otherwise brilliantly conceived show is telling. I’d move forward, if I were you, to an eccentric display about botanical art that places, for instance, papiermâché plant models from 1900 beside a silk kimono printed with images of British grasses by the also-british Anthea Hamilton in 2015. Whatever you do, be sure to leave plenty of time for the exhibition finale: a whole room turned into a living calendar. The work, by Scottish artist Ruth Ewan, recreates a madcap experiment introduced by French Republicans in the wake of the 1789 Revolution. Devised by two mathematicians and a (subsequently executed) poet, each day was named after a plant, animal or agricultural tool and it was in use – incredibly – for almost 20 years.
Ewan’s installation, which first appeared at Camden Arts Centre in 2015, gives the calendar physical form, so you have an 18th-century wine press beside some hemp and a peach, and hellebore beside broccoli and an axe. I could go on. Wherever you look, another curio hits you. It’s so worming with motifs and stories that you could return to it your entire life and keep finding something new.