In the frame

ALL art is highly artificial because it entails giving shape and meaning to the amorphous flow of experience.

ALL art is highly artificial because it entails giving shape and meaning to the amorphous flow of experience.

Stories have to have characters and plot, even if there is all the difference in the world between the cut-out characters and wearily grinding plots of popular fiction and the complex, sometimes elusive ones of Joyce or Proust. And plots must have a beginning, a middle and an end, in the wonderfully abstract way that Aristotle defined them: a beginning implies something following it but not something preceding it; a middle implies something preceding and something following; and an ending implies something preceding but not following.

The same is true of pictorial art, which must have composition, both structurally and chromatically, to exist as a coherent thing in itself. For centuries writers and painters have been beguiled by the idea of some kind of naturalism, a direct transcription of living experience -- whether in the Renaissance conception of the picture as an open window or the French nouveau roman dream of reproducing unmediated subjectivity -- but in the end a work of art cannot just be like reality, whatever we take that to be; it also has to be different. It has to have its own self-consistent formal integrity if it is to crystallise whatever intuition or insight the artist is seeking to convey.

The object of landscape painting is to articulate the experience we have of the natural world that surrounds us, and that experience is ultimately of a spiritual kind, at least in the minimal sense of acknowledging the existence of some reality outside our minds and greater than our own. Merely to become aware of such a world outside the neurotic and narcissistic mirror-chamber of the mind can be exhilarating. But two great traditions of landscape painting, the Chinese and the European, have sought to capture some of this spontaneous, though often momentary and sporadic, delight in the life of nature and make it available to reflection and sustained meditation. Chinese theorists thought of landscape painting as offering the distilled experience of nature to scholarly bureaucrats, whose city employment prevented them from spending as much time as they would have liked in the country. But how do you represent the multifariousness, the myriad forms and constant change of nature? The Chinese devised a language of forms for the evocation of rocks, water and trees that was capable of endless variation across many centuries. In Europe, landscape was initially used as a background to figure subjects, emerging as a genre in its own right in the course of the 16th century and achieving in the 17th the classical synthesis that forms the basis -- and point of departure -- for later developments in the 19th and 20th centuries.

If there is one thing that defines Western landscape, it is the sense of an implied viewer, first of all in the grid of orthogonals determined by the vertical viewer gazing out towards the horizon in accordance with the basic model of rational perspective. More subtly, the viewer is implied in the projection of distant motifs on to the same plane as ones in the middle ground: it is only to our eye that middle-ground trees, for example, and distant hills become part of the same formal whole that is the basis of composition. The modernists were not the first to realise that a picture is, among other things, an organisation of shapes on a flat plane.

But this relation of the middle ground and background becomes satisfactory only at a certain distance. If we are too close to the trees, they will loom above us, too big to grasp pictorially, while the background will be dwarfed. If we are too far away, the middle and back will merge. So the most effective distance, in establishing a dynamic but balanced relation between motifs at different depths in space, also implies that man has a proper place in the world of nature, a place from which that world is, in a sense, intelligible.

This is why the classical landscape is the benchmark against which we can understand later artists who departed from this harmonious vision in pursuit of a vertiginous experience of the sublime, like Turner, or of the fugitive sense of the momentary with the impressionists. It is also what helps us to see the distinctive qualities of the landscape photographs in Judy Annear's Photography and Place exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW.

Perhaps the first thing you notice on walking into this show is that few of the pictures make much visual impact from a distance. It is not just that they are mostly relatively small, for even a very small painting or drawing can make a strong impact from across a room. It is because most of them have departed from the model of pictorial composition just described. The grid of verticals and horizontals that articulates space into pattern is weakened, and the horizon line itself, the most fundamental of compositional anchors, is sometimes lacking.

In many cases, with the striking exception of Ricky Maynard's The Healing Garden, tonal structure is attenuated as well.

Many of the pictures are concerned with details of natural life, such as peeling bark on a tree, or twigs and leaf litter on the forest floor. They convey that feeling we sometimes have, especially when alone in nature, of its infinite complexity and interest, the sense that each minute detail is endlessly absorbing. It is the sort of experience described by Goethe in a passage where the young Werther is fascinated by every blade of grass, or in Blake's Auguries of Innocence, where he speaks of seeing the universe in a grain of sand.

The converse of this absorption in the particular is the feeling of being overwhelmed by the whole. This was the experience of the sublime dear to the romantics, that intoxicating fascination with the spectacle of vastness and power, of things like volcanoes and avalanches in the Alps and storms at sea that could annihilate us but filled us with excitement.

Here, beside the pictures of leaves and twigs, we find several that represent vast open spaces, too far away to be articulated by the forms of trees. Lynn Silverman, significantly, combines these two extremes: in a series of works that are split horizontally and taken from the same spot, she presents us with endless vastness above and, below, a tiny detail, like a random sample of the life infinitely replicated, and impossible to represent, in the larger view.

What is excluded in these images of nature, even though Silverman includes the toes of her boots in the close-up details, is precisely that place for the human within an orderly and proportionate world that is implied by the classical landscape. It is like the predicament famously described by Pascal, the French 17th-century mathematical prodigy and philosopher: man, he feels, is lost between the two infinities revealed by the invention of the telescope and the microscope.

Pascal used this sense of disorientation as part of his critique of humanism and rationalism, as part of his argument for a return to faith. Today artists are no doubt drawn to this vision of nature out of a sense that man does not deserve the privileged place in relation to nature that we have generally assumed.

On the one hand we have abused our position, and damaged the natural environment that sustains us, and on the other we remain pathetically vulnerable to the vagaries of the physical world, to short-term catastrophes and to longer-term events such as climate change, to which we may contribute but which, as a longer view of history shows, also has a momentum of its own that we barely understand. The coming and going of the ice ages and the desertification of North Africa and our own continent have nothing to do with our activities, however thoughtless.

A double boundlessness of time as well as space is evoked in many images, including those of Ingeborg Tyssen in which dead trees have become almost as inorganic as the surrounding rocks. Life has come and has gone again, leaving inexplicable silence. Debra Phillips's distant views of flat plains speak of human isolation in endless space -- relying for compositional form almost entirely on the power of the horizon -- but also in the infinite flow of time: the photographs appear to be taken seconds apart, so that the clouds and what landscape artists used to call accidents of light on the ground below are slightly but noticeably different.

The general view of nature that emerges from the exhibition is thus post-romantic with elements of contemporary concerns, but this sensibility is most effective on a smaller scale; as already mentioned, these are for the most part not pictures that make a striking impression from a distance, but they reward a closer and more intimate engagement, and some of them, like those of Paul Ogier, continue to resonate in the memory afterwards. The larger works that attempt to make a strong visual impact as wall pictures are less successful, perhaps because the sublime, as we can see in earlier painting too, needs a certain precision and articulation to avoid the trap of dissolving into mere vagueness.

One exception to this is Rosemary Laing's After Heysen, which borrows the painter's motif of a diagonal path between gum trees but washes the colours out to a pale, elegiac palette. Attempts at more specific political or social commentary are less successful, as we can see in Anne Ferran's enormous prints on aluminium, although they are in themselves quite impressive. If you are not already familiar with the series, it will come as a complete surprise to learn that they represent the site of a convict women's workhouse. Perhaps they do, but nothing in the work tells us this, and so it can hardly be considered part of the aesthetic impact, which is far more about the endless stubbly aridity of the land.

Likewise, the wall labels that assure us rather earnestly that this or that work is imbued with political intention are less than convincing. The problem is not only that specific references may be too obscure to be understood from the works themselves, but above all that the world of nature is too big, its scope, especially as evoked by these artists, too boundless for these things to register.

Trying to attach a political message or moral to a reality whose scale is beyond human concerns is reminiscent of the memorable episode in Conrad's Heart of Darkness where a French warship is distantly seen firing its cannons into the jungle: "In the empty immensity of earth, sky and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent."

Photography and Place: Australian Landscape Photography 1970s Until Now
Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney until May 29.