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The Idea of North (Topographics)

作者:
Peter Davidson
ISBN :
9781861892300
出版日期:
2004-11-15 00:00:00
语言:
国家地区:
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Lothian shore of the Forth in Scotland, but with all trace of human habitation removed. This imaginary continent acquired its name Naboland (eighbouring land�in Norwegian) from the name of a ship, an accident of collision with a submarine in a report read by chance in a Turkish newspaper, when Behrens was working as an archaeological draughtsman. Stylistically, his works depend to a considerable degree on his training in the meticulous accuracy of archaeological drawing, and on his related Viennese studies of antastic hyperrealist�painting techniques. When he began to travel as a student he first went to Iceland and Norway �distant northern lands, places with icy and volcanic landscapes �but he felt isolated by language, and they did not answer precisely his imagination of northness. In contrast, Scotland offered the first real places to correspond to his interior world. Minutes after his arrival in 1979 on the Hamburg to Newcastle ferry, he saw his first British road sign reading simply he North� This generalization, as opposed to the precise reckoning of kilometres on Continental signs, struck him as transformational, poetic. Soon after, he found the physical equivalent for his imaginary arctic land in Scotland, on the snowy plateau of the Cairngorms. In 1979�0 he travelled and climbed in the Scottish hills, playing with an echo of extreme explorations, imagining the wintry Cairngorms into the Himalayas and the Arctic. His companions in the Edinburgh University Mountaineering Club onroe-bashing on Mars Bars� with their intrepidity and self-sufficiency, their reluctance to stop for a second to look at a view, became in his imagination the descendents of Victorian explorers, the heroes of such boy books as Ice World Adventures or Adventures in the Arctic Regions: Romantic Incidents and Perils of Travel, Sport and Exploration around the Poles. The manifestations of Naboland in Behrens art, almost always taking the form of carefully detailed xpedition Reports�with documentary drawings and installations, are often derived from objects found in distant places: screes, remote glens, beaches. These found objects are drawn with the clarity and accuracy of an archaeological or scientific survey, painstaking plates from the report, as it were, of the Naboland Exploration Society. When they are made into part of a Behrens installation they often acquire deadpan labels, misleading, impeccably realized documentation. As with the creation of Zembla within Nabokov Pale Fire, the sheer skill and effort that have gone 118
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