Inconsolable

This installation looks at the history of the sublime landscape in relation to the evolution of the American ideal. This ideal was essentially both European and Modern. From the beginning the American landscape stood in for this ideal, and the values of rationalism and romanticism were projected onto the land and its native inhabitants. The new land was seen to personify the modern ideals of liberty and self-reliance, it was being “discovered” by European colonizers at the same time that the Sublime Landscape was being created in the mind of European culture. Partly because of this coincidence the American landscape was being mythologised even as it was being discovered. In both literature and image it was used to sublime effect. The American landscape thus became a “virtual” landscape created in the likeness, and in support of, the new nation. As the National Romantics of Europe presented idealized landscapes as signifiers of national essence in terms of history, so the American landscape personified the state in terms of an absence of history. With time, as the American ideal failed, so the Sublime nature of its virtual landscape approached the condition of Kitsch, which is where it stands today.

The installation Inconsolable evokes these issues in the conjunction of its various elements:

• The figure of Alban Berg, whose name means mountain. A European, he was the quintessential modern man, a product of fin-de-siecle Vienna. He stands for the tragic love of youth, virginity and promise, in the figure of Manon Gropius, the sixteen-year-old girl eulogized by his Violin Concerto.
• The digital recreation of the Inconsolable Range, optimized for sublime effect, named by Jake Driggers, a legendary gold prospector after he failed to relocate a massive mother lode he had found while lost in a storm.
• The quilt, a product of the American Simonite tradition of quilting, provider of comfort and moral analogy, incorporating an image of the sublime landscape rendered kitsch as well as traditional decorative and religious motifs.

Finally, the elements of the installation are explained, in the didactic style, by the leaflets provided in the installation, and by a corresponding web site <www.stephenhilyard.com/art/incon>. Historical information is provided concerning the various elements of the installation, together with analytical diagrams and links to scholarly sources.

However, the information provided is, to varying degrees, unreliable. Parts of it are entirely fictional; parts have been altered slightly, other parts not at all. For instance, there is a range of mountains named “Inconsolable”, but it is not in the Rocky Mountains, and the story of how it got its name is adapted from an extant gold rush story, with the addition of the fictional figure of Jake Driggers. This aspect of the installation attempts to deflate the apparently didactic (not to say pompous) quality of the material being presented. In doing this it questions the whole notion of the museological project; the presentation of “history” and “facts”.