Figure 1. Reconstruction Sea 0°-135°, 1972-1973

by S. Devabhaktuni

In collages produced in the 1970’s the Dutch artist Jab Dibbets explored relationships between landscape and geometry.  More recent reprisals of this theme take the form of large scale, photographic prints.  Both sets of work take the Dutch landscape as their subject-matter and are brought together in an exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, with the more recent work also on display at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York.  In these investigations, the horizontal demarcation between sea and sky is aligned to the limit between sky and land, asserting the Netherlands almost precarious flatness.  The work figures the threshold between land and sea as an abrupt cut in space that creates an equivalence in the topography of the two fields.  The ground is flat like the ocean, their horizons both a far off distance.

Figure 2. Panorama Dutch Mountain 12 x 15° Sea II A 1971

(This version is slightly different from the one referred to in the text)

Dibbets is often categorized as a land-artist.  But unlike contemporaries in the 1970s who bulldozed earth or displaced stones, here Dibbets is one step removed from the landscape, always separated by the camera lens.  While some land-artists used photography and film to document physical interventions, Dibbets created images that would later be collaged.  In his work, photographs are not documents of a physical intervention or event, but instead, raw unworked material.   Through cutting, rotation, drawing and text, the photographs are transformed but the landscape itself is never touched.  This detached relationship seems founded on a certain appreciation of the clarity of the horizontal Dutch horizon, suggesting at the same time that transformation can only happen in a conceptual rather than physical space, one that is as vast and precise as the opening up of that infinite limit.

Figure 3. Horizon/Land Sea, 2007

In Reconstruction Sea 0˚-135˚ (1972-1973) Dibbets collages photos so that the horizon becomes a curving arc across the page.  This arc contrasts with the stepped, irregular frames of the photographs themselves and recalls the grade school exercise where straight lines are connected to form a curve, its trajectory becoming smoother with each added vector.  Dibbets photographed the sea in consecutive shots, tilting the camera with each frame so that the ocean cuts obliquely across the first image, moves to the horizontal in a middle frame and finishes, several iterations later in the vertical.  Below the collage, is a geometrical drawing that seems implicitly figured by the photos above.  This drawing suggests a mathematical precision to the process, asserting an automatic, mechanical character that places the collage in the realm of exercise and investigation.

In Panorama (Dutch Mountain) (1971) Dibbets rotates the camera in a slightly different way.  Here two narrow, rectangular collages, one above the other, describe a bulging shoreline: the Dutch Mountain of the title.  This fictional landscape is collaged together using the reconstituted images of the horizon: flatness transformed into a projected curvature.  In the top collage, shadows of two figures on the wet sand occupy one side of the composition. Like Reconstruction Sea, this work also includes a small drawing, here composed of three overlaid elements: the outlines of the reconstituted, bulging shore; the wavering tracery of the wet sand marking the ocean’s reach; and a vertical outline marking each individual photo frame.  Lines drawn from the bottom of these vertical frames lead to a single point defining 15˚ angles that correspond to the tilt of the artist’s camera between each shot.

The drawing, which at once seems projective and descriptive, again alludes to a reading of the collages as rigorous and mechanical.  It proposes (or describes) the reconstitution of the horizon into a differently structured space. The drawing transforms the flat meeting of earth, sea and sky into a pliable limit that can be restructured through the logic of geometry and figure.  The drawing’s ambiguity, the impossibility of knowing its precise role in the work’s creation, whether it came before or after the collage, further complicates our understanding of the work.  Are we looking at something projected beforehand from the mind or made possible by observation and experimentation?  The ambiguity suggests that these two modes of creation are fluid and overlapping.  The nature of the panorama — the camera moving across the horizon, each photo recording a single moment, the horizontal distance traveled by the eye — opens up a space for reflection.  The ironic bulge of the Dutch Mountain suggests show how geometry can transform the physical space of the horizon into a conceptual one, so that landscape itself can be understood as a kind of abstraction.

This transformation becomes even more pronounced in the artist’s more recent work, where he treats large format photographs of the horizon as puzzle pieces assembled to form new geometries.  The work brings to mind Ellsworth Kelly’s shaped canvases, where bright panels of color on polygon supports are grouped into new juxtapositions of color and form.  Dibbets’ palette comprises the grass-colored green, and the differing blues of the sky and the ocean of his photographs.  He arranges, crops and rotates the large scale photographs to form various geometries: repeated diamonds, skewed squares, “L’s”, rectangles hung obliquely.  In most of these works, the horizon — forming a continuous line between earth, sea, and sky above both — remains horizontal giving the irregular frame of vision a stability tied to the viewing body and the ground below. If Kelly’s works offer a pure appreciation of form and color, a vision of abstraction that demands a filtered, concentrated kind of looking, Dibbets opens up that vision, admitting the sky and the earth into that pure space and transforming our experience of landscape.

Dibbets signs his paper-mounted works in the middle of the page along the bottom edge.   This odd placement of sensuous, considered script implies a vertical axis that divides the large, rectangular sheets.  This axis enters into tension with the horizontal of the horizon line.  It is as if the artist places himself in the middle of the work.  With his signature, he is inscribed within the frame as a solitary figure, his eye and camera, looking inwards.  It is a strange kind of positioning that forces the viewer to jostle for that privileged space.  Through this subtle denial, the artist forces us to look from a different vantage, so that we can no longer imagine ourselves present at the juncture of landscapes, but rather only in a position outside of that field, within the gallery or museum. And it is from this outside, that the horizon becomes a conceptual figure, calling forth its latency.

”Jan Dibbets: Horizons”