Theirs was not, therefore, an entirely escapist construction of nature as the pristine, prelapsarian other to urban modernity but rather an engagement with the awkward, ugly remains of modern exploitation.Filmmakers compel rituals through the moving image. Rather than ruined architecture, Van Gogh and Cézanne dwell on the feral remains of capitalist exploitation of natural resources: damaged nature fallen to ruin. Valenciennes had influentially promoted a mode of classical landscape whose status was elevated above other landscapes (in the hierarchy of genres) because of the inclusion of small-scale mythological narratives and the quotation of Greco-Roman ruins. Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Cézanne were not the first French artists to represent abandoned quarries, but both painters exercised remarkable formal violence in the signature brushwork of their quarry paintings that effectively trashed the expectations of the Historical Landscape as formulated by academic theoretician Pierre-Henri Valenciennes in the early nineteenth century. Throughout the nineteenth century, from the Isle-de-France to the arid plains of Provence, the French landscape was quarried to build cities, towns and roads. This paper proposes to read paintings of quarries in the Paris region and in Provence that Van Gogh and Cézanne repeatedly painted through Smithson’s notion of the “entropic ruin”.
Robert Smithson, in his infamous essay “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic” suggests that the notion of what constitutes a “monument” is constructed by the spectator who alone determines its cultural value. The best known case is the wildly spectacular Buttes-Chaumont park, landscaped for the 1867 Universal Exposition to hide the former lime quarries, squatters’ camps and waste dumping grounds. Open quarries on the edge of Paris (whose material had built the city) became embarrassing eyesores and were often filled in and tidied up. When depleted, it is typically abandoned its remaining void remaining then fills with refuse and run off waters that “rise into ruin,” breeding miasma and social panic. Although bearing witness to strenuous work, as a subject of representation it cannot summon the sort of national pride invested in fertile agricultural landscapes, industrious windmills and aqueducts quarried land is an intervention better off forgotten. An abandoned rock quarry is a ruined, emptied landscape.
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