The View From the Road (2014-15)

Speedscaping. 2015. ArchiCAD drawing: Joseph Lythe

Speedscaping. 2015. Diorama Model. Installation View. Goldsmiths, University of London

Nick Ferguson. 2015. The Mobile Landscape. Production Image.

The View from the Road is a visual arts project on billboards. It takes as its starting point billboards illegally positioned on agricultural land beside motorways and imagines them as sites for public art. The completed work comprises photographs, maps, models, drawings and text. It has been exhibited in the following formats and locations:

Online artwork, The Mobile Landscape, 2015. Stanley Picker Gallery.

Performance lecture, The Mobile Landscape. 2014,  Stanley Picker Gallery. Also at: ‘Across RCA: Beautiful and New: The Social Function of Sculpture and Architecture’, Royal College of Art, October 29, 2014. Information available here.

Online artwork,  Speedscaping, 2015, Future Architecture Platform

Book Chapter, Speedscaping, In: Macay, R (ed.). 2015. When Site Lost the Plot. Urbanomic

Visual arts exhibition, The View from the Road, 2014, Goldsmiths, University of London

Research Context

Within the visual arts, critical approaches to billboard landscapes is indebted to the pioneering work of pop art. In his provocatively titled book God’s Own Junkyard, Blake presents the US as an Eden transformed under unchecked capitalism, condemning the billboards as ‘scars’ and ‘pestering sores’ that blight the landscape (Blake, 1964: 125). Blake’s writing has assumed a concept of landscape in its art historical, Romantic sense: the pictorial. However, his prose is offset by rich illustrations that signal a more ambivalent relationship to the places he has visited. In this alternative presentation, landscape is taken to be a territory subjected to a mapping impulse of detailed, disinterested observation. Thus, Blake’s project drew attention to the presence of two rival concepts of landscape. It also positioned artistic enquiry into billboard landscapes as an instrument with which to investigate these concepts. It did not, however, significantly advance understanding of the relationship between these concepts or of how they relate to wider theories about the pictorial, observation and the politics of land.

Ruscha took the billboards that punctuate the rural and urban landscapes of southern California as material for his art. His treatment, one of cool reserve and devoid of judgement, was a way of playing out an artist’s persona that was gaining traction by the 1960s, as theorised by historian Moira Roth in her essay The Aesthetics of Indifference (1998.) Roth understood this persona as delivering a critique of the oppressive political regimes of the time and argued that it was played out in pop’s indifference to the subjects it investigated. Although not discussed by Roth, Ruscha’s billboards would also seem to exemplify the critique she identifies, signalling that this body of work belongs at the forefront of critical enquiry into the relationship between artistic vision, territory and liberal political thought.

Walker Evans. 1933-4 Billboard Painter

Peter Blake. 1964. Page from. Gods Own Junkyard

Ed Ruscha. 1976. Liquor Locker. From the series. Sunset Strip

Also widely explored in art and visual culture is the relationship between the road and the places through which it passes. In film the car windscreen has been imagined as a cinematic screen on which an ever-changing view is projected. In Incidents of Mirror Travel in Yukatan (1971) American land artist Robert Smithson used the car window provides a a framing device that, when moving at speed, affords a method of viewing landscape which subverts the landscape painter’s slow, privileged attention in which the land is orientated towards the subject’s acquisitive mind. In this way the fleeting landscape conditions a shallow, almost indifferent gaze. The reappraisal of the driver’s gaze finds further treatment in Michael Schwarzers Zoomscape where the author notes: ‘Driving encourages a nonchalant way of looking.’ (2004: 72). If, as I have argued elsewhere, artistic attention has beginnings in the aristocratic affectation known as ‘nonchalance’, then the billboards that line the highway provide an opportunity to test the possibilities of dromoscopy as a fitting mode of attention for the art researcher.

Exhibition Documentation

Nick Ferguson. 2014. The View from the Road. Installation view. Goldsmiths
Nick Ferguson. 2014. The View from the Road. Installation view. Goldsmiths
Nick Ferguson. 2014. The View from the Road. Installation view. Goldsmiths
Nick Ferguson. 2014. The View from the Road. Installation view. Goldsmiths
Nick Ferguson. 2014. The View from the Road. Installation view. Goldsmiths
Nick Ferguson. 2014. The View from the Road. Installation view. Goldsmiths

Workings: Maps, drawings, photos, models

Nick Ferguson and Richard Beard. 2013. Billboard with landscape. Mixed media

Nick Ferguson and Richard Beard. 2013. Billboard with landscape. Mixed media

Nick Ferguson and Richard Beard. 2013. Billboard with landscape. Mixed media

Nick Ferguson. 2014. Billboard with landscape. Pencil on paper.

Nick Ferguson. 2014. Billboard with landscape 2. Pencil on paper.

Nick Ferguson. 2014. Billboard with landscape 3. Pencil on paper.

Nick Ferguson and Richard Beard. 2013. Billboard with landscape. Mixed media

Nick Ferguson and Richard Beard. 2013. Billboard with landscape. Mixed media

Nick Ferguson and Richard Beard. 2013. Billboard with landscape. Mixed media

Location map. ArchiCAD drawing: Joseph Lythe

Elevation. ArchiCAD drawing: Joseph Lythe

Still. ArchiCAD drawing: Joseph Lythe

Billboard artwork prior to anamorphic adjustment.

Projection diagram showing anamorphic adjustment required for the image needed to look normal when viewed from the road.

Billboard artwork following anamorphic adjustment

Billboard test strips. Digital print on blue back billboard paper

Billboard fragment. 1.8m x 1.2m. Digital print on blue back billboard paper

Diorama (detail). Location. Fulmer House Farm. M40 westbound. Scale 1:150

Nick Ferguson. 2013. Logo. M25 J14.

Nick Ferguson. 2013. Logo. M25 J14.

Nick Ferguson. 2013. Logo. M25 J14.

Nick Ferguson. 2013. Logo. M25 J14.

Nick Ferguson. 2013. Logo. M25 J14.

Nick Ferguson. 2013. Logo. M25 J14.

References and Further Reading

Alpes, S. 2005. The Vexations of Art. Velazquez and Others. Newhaven and London, Yale University Press.

Appleyard, D. Lynch. K and Myer J. 1964. The View From the Road. Cambridge Mass.

Ballard, J. 2014. Concrete Island. Fourth Estate.

Blake. P. 1964. God’s Own Junkyard. Henry Holt & Co.

Borden, I. 2013. Drive. Journeys Through Film, Cities and Landscapes. Reaktion Books.

Brenner, N. 2016.The Hinterland Urbanised. AD / Architectural Design, July/August, 2016, 118-127. Available at: http://www.urbantheorylab.net/publications/the-hinterland-urbanized/

Copely. S. 2010. The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape, and Aesthetics Since 1770. Cambridge University Press

Cosgrove. D. 2012. Geography and Vision. I B Tauris

Grabner, M and Killam B. (n.d) The Poor Farm. Available at: http://poorfarmexperiment.org/about/

Gray, E. 2005. Don Juan and the Poetics of Tourism. In: Poetry and Indifference. From the Romantics to the Rubáiyát. Amhurst and Boston: University of Massacusetts Press

Jacobsen. K, Leming. W. 2013. American Road. [DVD] Cold Chicago Productions.

Lowe, R. 1996. Letter to an Unknown Person. Available at: http://visualarts.britishcouncil.org/exhibitions/exhibition/landscape-2000/object/a-letter-to-an-unknown-person-no-5-lowe-1996-p7171

Merriman, P. 2007. Driving Spaces. A Cultural-historical Geography of England’s M1 Motorway. Wiley-Blackwell.  

Mitchell. W. 2002. Landscape and Power. University of Chicago Press.

Petit, C and Sinclair, I. 2002. London Orbital. DVD.

Roth. M. The Aesthetics of Indifference. In: Roth. M. 1998 Difference/Indifference. Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture. Routledge

Ruscha. E. 1966. Every Building on the Sunset Strip. Los Angeles. Self Published.

Schwarzer. M. 2004. Zoomscape. Architecture in Motion and Media. Princetown Architectural Press

UK Gov. 2004. Parliamentary Business Publications and Records. Available at https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200405/ldhansrd/vo041215/text/41215-03.htm

UK Gov. 2010. Roads: Illegal Motorway Advertising. Available at: https://www.theyworkforyou.com/lords/?id=2010-07-21a.967.5

Vertov. D. 1929. Man With a Movie Camera. DVD

Virilio, P. 1998. ‘Dromoscopy, or the Ecstasy of Enormity’. Trans. Edward O’Neill. Wide Angle 20.3 (1998) 11-22

Date: November 23rd, 2014

Category: Uncategorized

Comments/Trackbacks: Not allowed.