Andreas Rutkauskas\u2019s photographic production is undeniably geographic; it covers a wide spectrum of landscape. And because it touches on or explores various aspects of the territory, it can also seem a little scattered. Yet I believe this artist\u2019s work is entirely focused on traversals, motion, movement\u200a\u2014\u200aeminently contemporary phenomena\u200a\u2014\u200aas each of his photographic series broaches these themes from a particular angle. Rutkauskas\u2019s work, finally, deals essentially with landscapes of mobility, of which it reveals various facets. Here I will attempt to explore some of the perspectives on landscape opened up by his practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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$\"Cemetery-The-Chippewas-of-Sarnia\"$
Andreas Rutkauskas
Cemetery – The Chippewas of Sarnia,<\/em> Petrolia<\/em> series, 2013.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Photographs are mobile beings. They dawdle and amble around, rush, chase after the image, and sometimes travel through some curious places; one only has to think of those who take strolls \u201cin\u201d Google Street View or Google Earth, as Rutkauskas has done. Which goes to show that \u201cif the landscape is not a place\u201d^{\u2009<\/sup>}^{3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 3 <\/a> - Statement by Anne Cauquelin, who has been decried as a pure \u201cculturalist\u201d who excludes the possibility of a multi-sensorial reality and construes landscape exclusively as cultural construction, thus predetermined, rather than sensory (Anne Cauquelin, \u201cLe paysage n\u2019est pas un lieu,\u201d Paysages sur commande<\/em> (Rennes: Le Triangle, 1990), 92\u200a\u2014\u200a96).<\/span> (a debatable proposition), one some\u00adtimes has to immerse oneself in it in order to produce an image. As such, this applies as much to the Web as to physical sites. Landscape, then, beyond mere view, can be understood as an experience, a sensory one, \u201ca kind of affective geography\u201d that calls on more than one sense.^{\u2009<\/sup>}^{4<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 4 <\/a> - Jean-Marc Besse, \u201cLe paysage, espace sensible, espace public,\u201d Meta: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy<\/em>, vol. 2, no. 2 (2010): 268.<\/span> As early as the 1950s, John Brinckerhoff Jackson had already called for an active perception or grasp of landscapes, the \u201cdiscovery of mobility\u201d^{\u2009<\/sup>}^{5<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 5 <\/a> - John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Landscape in Sight: Looking at America<\/em> (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997 [1957]), 204\u200a\u2014\u200a205.<\/span> having prompted a new way of experiencing the world. And one cannot help thinking that navigating Google Earth, with all the strange manoeuvres this requires, is indeed not a passive form of discovery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"88_DO06_Paquet_Rutkauskas_N$
Andreas Rutkauskas<\/strong>
N 45\u00b0 28′ 34″ W 73\u00b0 37′ 18″<\/em>, Virtually There<\/em> series, 2010.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
From One Sublime to Another<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rutkauskas\u2019s series Virtually There<\/em> (begun in 2009) joins Google Earth, a relatively recent technology that enables stay-at-home travel,^{6<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 6 <\/a> - Original expression, \u201cvoyage casanier,\u201d from Pierre Bayard, Comment parler des lieux o\u00f9 l\u2019on n\u2019a pas \u00e9t\u00e9? <\/em>(Paris: \u00c9ditions de Minuit, 2012).<\/span> with the old photographic tradition of the sublime landscape. Landscape sublime in Canada is closely associated with the Rocky Mountains and train travel. Returning to Montr\u00e9al from the opening of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1984, William McFarlane Notman brought back his groundbreaking pictures of the Western Rockies for the pleasure of armchair travellers, who were legion in the nineteenth century. The images have been endlessly reproduced ever since, first by explorers and travellers of all types, and then by tourists. Rutkauskas returned to the neighbourhood, but it is his Google-strolls<\/em> that led him to particular sites and peaks. Exploring Google Earth while making some screen captures, he noted the coordinates that later allowed him to use a GPS device to find the actual site and retake the same pictures, this time with a large-format camera, as in the traditional production of majestic scenery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"virtually_there_scan$
Andreas Rutkauskas<\/strong>
N 51\u00b0 23′ 20″ W 116\u00b0 17′ 23″<\/em>, Virtually There<\/em> series, 2010.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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There is a strange temporal contraction in this series in which variously dated technologies come together, as if the rush forward orchestrated by Google\u2019s apparatus had taken us back in time. The primary role of representations of space and time (photography, by its cropping of the material, being the first medium suited to figuring them together) is seldom mentioned while discussing the \u201cradical compression of spatial and temporal horizons\u201d characteristic of modernity, a compression that is always said to be provoked by the advent of speedy transportation and communication.^{7<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 7 <\/a> - Jon May and Nigel Thrift, Timespace: Geographies of Temporality<\/em> (London: Routledge, 2001), 7.<\/span> The process of making the Virtually There<\/em> series actualizes and makes visible this spatiotemporal compression, which has only intensified in the transition from the modern to the contemporary.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Two recent series, Borderline<\/em> (2012\u20132015) and the Stanstead Project, or How to Cross the Border<\/em> (2011), explore some Canadian border zones. The photographs from the Stanstead Project<\/em> were taken in and around a small town in the Eastern Townships that is cut in two by an increasingly watched border. Beyond the village, the black and white images show a wide trench running through the forest, a line that seems to cut through the whole breadth of the continent, perspectival lines vanishing toward infinity that simultaneously suggest crossings, migrations, and transgressions. Paradoxically, they invite us to follow the trajectory of this illuminated no man\u2019s land, which seems to lie just outside real space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the Suburb Beautiful<\/em> series (2011), the ordinary landscapes that are multiplied and juxtaposed belong to the everyday. One could suppose them to be vernacular, but they are too civilized not to be political<\/em>, they are too perfectly ordered, too consistent, and they lack the native singularities that mark the vernacular.^{8<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 8 <\/a> - John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape<\/em> (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). See also Jean-Marc Besse, \u201cLe paysage, entre le politique et le vernaculaire. R\u00e9flexions \u00e0 partir de John Brinckerhoff Jackson,\u201d ARCHES<\/em>, Tome 6 (2003), 9-27, HAL Sciences de l\u2019Homme et de la Soci\u00e9t\u00e9, https:\/\/halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr\/halshs-00113275.<\/span> In fact, they are inscribed in geographic imagination as the absolute anti-sublime<\/em>, as much in their configuration as in their use. The photographs in this series are fascinating, however, as they reveal landscape arrangements that are unfalteringly identical from one end of the land to the other. From Winnipeg to Sainte-Rose, in suburban Montr\u00e9al, rowed cookie-cutter houses seem to draw lines, once again, that traverse the continent from East to West, almost without interruption. These well-aligned dwellings compose landscapes of mobility, of that social or socio-economic urban mobility that prompts city-dwellers to migrate to the periphery for various reasons, often financial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"88_DO06_Paquet_Rutkauskas_Cutline$
Andreas Rutkauskas<\/strong>
Cutline IV,<\/em> Stanstead Project<\/em> series, 2011.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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$\"88_DO06_Paquet_Rutkauskas_Kanata,$
Andreas Rutkauskas<\/strong>
Kanata, Ontario<\/em>, Suburb Beautiful<\/em> series, 2008.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Petrolia<\/em> (2011) <\/em>presents another facet of the landscape of economic mobility, one that could be said to be even more anti-sublime than that of the suburbs, but which attracts its own following of the curious, of photographers, and of sundry \u201cdereliction tourists.\u201d^{\u2009<\/sup>}^{9<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 9 <\/a> - Bradley L. Garrett, \u201cUndertaking Recreational Trespass: Urban Exploration and Infiltration,\u201d Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers<\/em>, vol. 39, no. 1(January 2014): 2.<\/span> This is the landscape of relocated industry, of capital flight. They are everywhere, these land\u00adscapes of the abandoned, of the disaffected and the decommissioned, of dispossession and contamination, proliferating throughout the world and in the photographs of many artists. Petrolia<\/em> focuses on the petrochemical installations in an area known as Chemical Valley, near Sarnia, Ontario. The monicker recalls Chemical Corridor<\/em>, which snakes along the Mississippi for about one hundred kilometres, from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, in Louisiana, and that locals have rechristened Cancer Corridor<\/em>. Toxic or economically toxic landscapes? This type of photography, conjuring both the horrors and the glory of bygone industry, is now becoming a particularly appreciated form of the sublime, a post-industrial sublime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"88_DO06_Paquet_Rutkauskas_Cul-de-sa\"$
Andreas Rutkauskas<\/strong>
Cul-de-sac<\/em>, Suburb Beautiful<\/em> series, 2007.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Correspondences<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Accompanying the presentation of the Petrolia<\/em> series on Rutkauskas\u2019s website is the reproduction of a ten dollar bill, issued in the 1970s and showing Chemical Valley. A twenty dollar bill in the same \u201cCanadian Scenes\u201d series, printed from 1969 onward, represents Moraine Lake, one of the most photographed sites in the Rockies from the nineteenth century to the present. At the time, national pride seemed to range indifferently from the natural sublime through to the industrial sublime; and oddly, the printing of this series of banknotes corresponds exactly with the great disillusionment, the end of the post-WWII economic boom, rung in by the oil crisis and by cognizance of the irreversible damage industrial pollution has caused the world and nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Parking-lot-Imperial-Oil-Complex-in-the-Background\"$
Andreas Rutkauskas<\/strong>
Parking lot, Imperial Oil Complex in the Background<\/em>,
Petrolia<\/em> series, 2013.
Photo : courtesy of the artist
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$\"Park-and-Nitrogen-Fertilizer-Plant-Town-of-Courtright\"$
Andreas Rutkauskas<\/strong><\/strong>
Park and Nitrogen Fertilizer Plant, Town of Courtright<\/em>, Petrolia<\/em> series, 2013.
Photo : courtesy of the artist
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According to Mitchell, landscape is a vast network of cultural codes and, like money, has no use in and of itself, but expresses an unlimited reserve of potential value.^{10<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 10 <\/a> - Mitchell, Landscape and Power<\/em>, 5. Also: \u201cDig out all the gold in a mountainside, and its wealth is exhausted. But how many photographs, postcards, paintings, and awestruck \u2018sightings\u2019 of the Grand Canyon will it take to exhaust its value as landscape?\u201d, 15.<\/span> Jonathan Crary, for his part, connected money with photography, saying that they are both totalizing systems, capable of binding or unifying all subjects within a single global network of value and desire.^{11<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 11 <\/a> - Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century<\/em> (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992), 13.<\/span> This dual association signals land\u00adscape\u2019s complex capacity for awakening desire, for attracting travellers, conquerors, speculators, and for getting them to move, while itself being mobile when coupled with other mediums. It has therefore always engendered greed and geographic imaginings that involve a possessive, imperialist, or cupidinous gaze.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Landscape\u200a\u2014\u200aeven if we now conceive that it may be experienced or inhabited, no longer merely a symbolic or cultural fabrication, perceptual and perspectival\u200a\u2014\u200aremains nonetheless a constructed form whose value is based on exchange and circulation. Today, whether it be post-industrial, (peri-)urban, or natural\u200a\u2014\u200aif such a thing still exists\u200a\u2014\u200athe space-time characteristic of landscape, composed of constant movement, comings and goings that bring the distant near, the absent present, may be wholly determined by socio-economic phenomena: physical and electronic mobility, migrations in every direction, capital movement, and capital flight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Translated from the French by Ron Ross<\/strong><\/p>\n
Andreas Rutkauskas, Suzanne Paquet<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Geography, in this sense, is an\u00a0art of representation, that is, an art of transportation and translation. How does one bring the distant into the near? How does one lend presence to absent realities?<\/br>
\u2014 Jean-Marc [NOTE count=1]Besse[\/NOTE][REF count=1]Jean-Marc Besse, Face au monde : atlas, jardins, g\u00e9oramas (Paris: Descl\u00e9e de Brouwer, 2003), 9 (our translation).[\/REF]<\/br>","protected":false},"author":1303,"featured_media":162165,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[882],"tags":[],"numeros":[2518],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[2546],"artistes":[2547],"thematiques":[],"type_post":[319],"class_list":["post-162406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post","numeros-88-landscape-en","auteurs-suzanne-paquet-en","artistes-andreas-rutkauskas-en","type_post-principal"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1303"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=162406"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":274798,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162406\/revisions\/274798"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/162165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=162406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=162406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=162406"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=162406"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=162406"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=162406"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=162406"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=162406"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=162406"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=162406"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=162406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}