False Terrain is based on a number of photographs of the Panorama of Scheveningen in the Hague, a 360º painting of the nearby coastal town made in 1881 by Hendrik Willem Mesdag, his wife Sientje Mesdag-van Houten and assistants. As a form, the panorama was an attempt to make a genuinely immersive painting, stitched into a continuous whole, with the top and bottom edges hidden from the viewer, thus becoming a painting without a frame. The lower edge of the cylindrical canvas is usually obscured by ‘false terrain’; in the Mesdag Panorama, this is achieved by placing the viewing platform in what is in effect a rise in the sand dunes, made with real sand, falling away out of the viewer’s eye-line, creating a dip before the vertical canvas rises up beyond.

This series of works on paper are studies for photographic prints, which would be made by only exposing sections of the paper to the negatives, leaving expanses of white paper between the images. This juxtaposes images from within the viewing platform with sections of the unseen structure behind the scenes, laying bare the illusion. The intention is to suggest that the details of these spaces shown have a relationship to each other, extending ‘under’ the white space which frames each image, inviting the viewer to speculate over the gaps off-frame.

Painting’s means to overcome the limitations of the frame was to culminate in the panorama, emerging at the end of the eighteenth century. This development of a 360º painting that surrounded the viewer was an attempt at ‘abolishing the frame’, as Bernhard Comment describes the desire which created it. In his ‘theory of the frame’ leading to the development of the panorama, Comment shows that there were two historically overlapping and contradictory impulses at work in painting after the invention of perspective and the development of the easel painting, pulling in divergent directions: once removed from its architectural base, an awareness emerged of the importance of the frame in order to create a separation which establishes the work of art as a work of art, set against the wish to abolish the frame for the possibility of a total immersion in the work of art, the desire for an entirely convincing illusion whereby this stops being a work of art.

The panorama took painting into the realm of simulation, and as such, away from ‘art’, representation. It also made the viewer mobile, in contrast to the nominally fixed viewer of Renaissance perspective. Lev Manovich sees these–simulation and representation–as being two traditions of the screen, the latter, representation, being that in which the fictive space (the unfixed and movable painting’s world) is separated from the that of viewer, to the former, simulation, in frescoes and mosaics, into the panorama and beyond, where the space depicted is contiguous with that of the viewer, allowing for mobility. It may not be purely coincidental that the two periods in which the panorama’s popularity as a form of entertainment was highest were just before the invention of photography at the start of the nineteenth century and then towards the end of that same century as cinema was being invented; the cinema screen fixed the viewer’s mobility once again.

The frame is an automatism across a multiplicity of different forms of visual art, determined by the technology of production and dissemination. Pictures, images of the world, by necessity exclude whatever is outside the frame, while being able to point to this outside in different ways. In my practice-based research The Image, the Frame, and the Off-frame I am interested in how this outside can be used structurally in the production of an artwork, activating this off-frame in a meaningful way.

References

Bernhard Comment, The Panorama, Reaktion Books, London 1999; translated by Anne-Marie Glasheen, originally published in France as Le XIXe siècle des panoramas, Société Nouvelle Adam Biro, 1993

Wolfgang Kemp, ‘The Narrativity of the Frame’, in The Rhetoric of the Frame: Essays on the Boundaries of the Artwork. Edited by Paul Duro, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1996

Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, MIT Press, Massachussetts, 2001

Nicholas Middleton is an artist with a background in painting and print, and interests in photography, film and video. He studied printmaking at Winchester School of Art and is currently a PhD candidate in the School of Arts and Humanities. As a painter he has exhibited widely in the UK, as well as abroad, and has been selected for the John Moores Painting Prize five times, twice winning the Visitors' Choice Prize. Recent work has investigated the relationship between photography, film, and painting.

Source photographs from the Mesdag Panorama