What constitutes an American landscape? The phrase conjures wide-open spaces, iconic natural wonders and wholesome heartland towns across the USA. One might think of Thomas Cole’s Hudson River School paintings, Ansel Adams’s photographs, John Ford’s Westerns, or even advertisements for Marlboro cigarettes and GMC trucks…
A Sylvester Stallone action movie from the 1980s, maybe not. However, as Alain Bublex demonstrates with An American Landscape, the backdrop for the original John Rambo movie (First Blood, 1982) is indeed a reflection, celebration and perpetuation of a particular vision of America’s landscapes — one that is heavily informed by art history.

Extract from Mara Hoberman’s text for the press release

To create An American Landscape, Bublex digitally redrew scenes from First Blood, faithfully recreating camera movements and cuts while eliminating all human presence. In removing the actors from this quintessential action movie, Bublex lets the scenery engulf the original Panavision widescreen format and emerge as the film’s true American hero. The forty-minute animation moves between majestic snowcapped mountains, an archetypal Main Street, lakeside cabins festooned with hanging laundry, and dirt roads winding through birch tree forests. An original score, including ambient bird chirps and rustling leaves, accentuates the intrinsic drama of the landscape itself in all its alternately idyllic, nostalgic and menacing glory.

A selection of framed stills from An American Landscape highlights compositional similarities between certain backdrops in First Blood and works by nineteenth and twentieth century American landscape painters. Spectacular mountain vistas recall the expansive majesty captured in the Hudson River School paintings of the White Mountains, while more focused vignettes depicting a small coppice and an empty gas station evoke the melancholic musings of American regionalists like Charles Burchfield and Edward Hopper. Nightscapes featuring glowing neon lights bring to mind Robert Cottingham’s fascination with signage and other urban Americana. Even the most abstract of the stills, which is based on a scene in the movie where street lights begin to flicker out because of a blackout, harkens back to some of Georgia O’Keefe’s most sublime urban nocturnes. By reframing First Blood within an art historical context, Bublex points out that the true marvel of the American landscape is that it owes just as much to cultural construction as it does to natural phenomena.

Mara Hoberman

Organising an exhibition can be seen as testing out a hypothesis which can only
be presented – and defended – by establishing a convincing relationship between
the works it has recourse to. A hypothesis, then, cannot be a clearly formulated
theory demanding verification, and even less so a discourse whose lofty sentences
are appropriately interconnected by the exhibits. It is either a promising idea
still lacking a concept, an intuitive sense of a novel and hopefully fruitful
interrelationship, or a group of works one would like to bring together to observe
how this juxtaposition changes them.
A dual hypothesis, then: as to what would be (should be?) an exhibition and as
to what an exhibition actually does. Since the first part can’t be gone into
here, let’s take a look at the second, with Alain Bublex proposing, in backdrop
(arrière-plan), to test out a hypothesis in the way mentioned above. To put it
briefly: ‘The creation of a «national» political and cultural space most often goes
hand in hand with a trend towards representation of its landscapes.’ Or in other
words, as soon as a people endows itself with a common future (and invents for
itself a shared past), it feels the need to portray what surrounds it and what has
preceded it. It then does two things that are only seemingly contradictory: it
portrays the irreducible strangeness of these landscapes while at the same time
recognising them as its own. Thus a landscape – whether painted or natural – is not
solely a visual transformation of the natural environment; it is also an assertion
of the strangeness of what is there. One of the works Bublex has opted for in trompe
l’oeil form is a landscape by Albert Bierstadt, a painter of the American West and
its wilderness. Interestingly, it was Bierstadt’s paintings that led Congress to
pass the Yellowstone Park Bill in 1872 and so create history’s first national park.
Bublex is not trying to say that a pictorial space is also a political space – in
itself a truism – but rather that the establishment of a country as a political
space involves that country’s representation of landscape. And this representation
changes with time: the time of history and the time of art. After Bierstadt,
backdrop (arriére-plan) presents pictures by Charles Sheeler and Morris Louis,
offering a curious history of American painting from wilderness to Abstract
Expressionism. This placing of a Morris Louis picture beside an industrial
landscape by Sheeler the modernist speaks eloquently of the intuitive aspect of
the hypothesis. The first major style produced by American painting, Abstract
Expressionism is, as much as Bierstadt’s Rocky Mountains, part of the cultural
landscape in question; and a trained eye will not fail to detect in the overlaid
strips of colour of Louis ‘veils’, diluted to the point of translucency, the distant
heritage of Bierstadt’s spectral backdrops: trees and mountains given a strangely
ghostly look by the scorching sun rising over his landscapes.
There remains, however, the question of how the hypothesis is actually put to
work: of the ‘rigging’ (as Bublex calls it) which underpins its structuring, which
renders visible an exhibition whose construction has been halted – abandoned
or gone to ruin – and which thus refers all the exhibits back to the contingency
of their finish. We must not conclude, though, that all landscape is ruin; simply,
rather, that it captures and as a result ultimately effaces the strangeness of
what is there. ‘Rigging’ – also to be taken here in its nautical sense – consists
in making discernible the activities that art presupposes and often conceals; which
is also the message conveyed in their own way by the original works Bublex has
dotted throughout backdrop (arriére-plan): landscape photographs in which a part
– a freeway, Mount Fuji, etc. – is reproduced by vectorial drawing, as additions
whose obviousness (they in no way interfere with the image) testifies to the familiar
artificiality of our surroundings.
Alain Bublex has never stopped making landscapes in a country that has produced
none since the end of the Ancien Régime (with some notable exceptions: the ghost
of Albert Marquet haunts the exhibition) Republican France took shape without
offering any image of itself; which is probably why, today, we find it so hard to
look at her without nostalgia.
Bastien Gallet