Gertrude Stein’s Landscapes, and Other Things That Are All at Once

I have always liked things that were all at once.

Not abundance so much as excess.

But excess is not quite the correct word. What I am thinking about, what I have many times tried to make, what I have often loved, is the exuberance of too much possibility. Too much: those things that capture, or at least organize and aestheticize, the ways the world is often too much.

A Polish poet, a line I first encountered as the epigraph to a novel about global pandemic and the future it might wreak: “The bright side of the planet moves toward darkness / And the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour, / And for me, now as then, it is too much. / There is too much world.”[1] I try to make work, both art and scholarship, that contemplates but also creates this “too much world”: too many voices to understand, too many images to follow, too many details to comprehend. The thing about too much is that it is so hard to capture; the thing about too much is also that it is not the same for everyone. I am interested in how there is too much world, how that too much gets told, comes into relation, into friction, into story, by who in what metaphors and why. What structures the feelings of being in relation, and how knowledge gets named and organized, how it gets captured. The things that capture too much are really things that catch the feeling of being complicit in a superabundance we cannot control. There are artworks, sentences, flashes of current events that turn this quality of the world back towards us. And these are the things I find the most interesting because, in catching the too much, they tell us something about capture as well as about too much.

Too much is often a consequence of scale and contrast. It is in the things that hold specificity in tension with a global articulation, that show the lines of operation in a system. These lines of operation are so often distinct and clear and also too much to contemplate. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing writes about this collision and collusion of scales through friction, specifically the frictions that are generated—importantly, usefully—in “the awkward, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference” that occurs as the universal and the particular try to hold themselves together.[2]

Tsing thinks about the too much of global capitalism as it hits the local (and the too much of the local as it collides with the global). Friction is “the grip” of this encounter (1). This is important because “[i]n the historical particularity of global connections, domination and discipline come into their own, but not always in the forms laid out by their proponents” (5). This grip, this capturing, this catching, lays bare all the ways the world exceeds us, as well as the ways it does not.

And thinking about this: about too much world, about the all-at-onceness of certain things, about certain artworks that are too full yet also just right, about certain moments in the world that are excessive but also somehow satisfying, about what this might have to do with the connections, dominations, and disciplines of capitalism, about what this might have to do with how we build a shared reality to live in, about how this all hangs together in the present—I think about Gertrude Stein and her essay “Plays” and the landscapes she was trying to construct.

Stein writes, “if a play was exactly like a landscape then there would be no difficulty about the emotion of the person looking on at the play being behind or ahead of the play because the landscape does not have to make acquaintance.”[3] Stein’s explanation of the landscape and how it works is a bit of visual fiction. The landscape stops time and interrupts the unfolding of relation; it “does not have to make acquaintance.” The consequence of this is that things are “just here,” hanging in the air beside each other:

Magpies are in the landscape that is they are in the sky of a landscape, they are black and white and they are in the sky of the landscape in Bilignin and in Spain, especially in Avila. When they are in the sky they do something that I have never seen any other bird do they hold themselves up and down and look flat against the sky.

A very famous French inventor of things that have to do with stabilisation in aviation told me that what I told him magpies did could not be done by any bird but anyway whether the magpies at Avila do do it or do not at least they look as if they do do it. (129)

Stein’s act of willful misunderstanding, her decision that the birds “do do” what they cannot do, doesn’t reduce the world with her flattened landscape even as it seems to bend what is true. The magpies lie flat and unmoving against the sky, despite the fact that what “magpies did could not be done by any bird.” In making an image, Stein makes the world anew.

She does this to solve the problem of theater. The problem of theater is one of time that puts relations out of sync, out of phase with one another. Watching the theater unsettles Stein because the watcher is out of sync with the action. There is an excess of story, of different tempos, of feeling and reactions. Theater makes Stein nervous because one’s experience, one’s emotional time as an audience member, is syncopated with the actions unfolding on stage.

Sara Ahmed, in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, writes that emotions “both generate their objects, and repeat past associations.”[4] Ahmed is talking—like Stein but also not like Stein—about how emotions circulate and, in doing so, create economies of impact, accrue to objects, sticking to things as much as shaping them. She is thinking about the feelings that attach to certain bodies and thus delimit—make possible or implausible—their movements in the world. How emotion captures, collects, documents the strain of moving in worlds that don’t intend for you to be there. Emotion is consequence, consequential. Emotion documents how we feel the world, the world’s too much, alongside one another. Too much world is a feeling.

And both Stein and Ahmed remind us that feeling is information, a way of knowing the world through the relations it brings into being. A relation that, in catching the feeling of the moment as it slips past abundance into something else, becomes a kind of capture. Even when it doesn’t hold, it makes something momentarily real in its grip.

I think about a series of images: a gigantic cargo ship lengthwise across a waterway, blocking an international transport artery; a white balloon that floats across blue sky, before it is shot down for spying; the map of a kilometers-long queue to see a dead queen’s coffin. Moments when the world exceeds itself, becomes ridiculous, reveals its already persistent ridiculousness, moments when it becomes too much. The contradictions of the world, its excessiveness and its frictions, make these images shimmer in surplus. The surplus of information, of meaning, momentarily contained. These images show us systems working even as they seem to snap. The metonym pulled so tight that it forgets it was ever supposed to only be part of the whole.

In “Plays,” Stein reflects on her opera Four Saints in Three Acts and claims “I think it did almost what I wanted, it made a landscape.” The landscape is Stein’s method for addressing (arresting) the syncopation of time, of story: “All these things might have been a story but as a landscape they were just there” (131).  The “might have been” of the work, its temporal unfolding as well that of the actions within it, is arrested; “these things” are arranged in the landscape, “just there.” In stills from the 1934 production of Stein’s opera, the performance as landscape is evident: the stage is crowded with performers under the glistening of draped cellophane, dramatic objects visible between their frozen poses (a lion, plastic palm trees, fringed chairs).

Stein writes: “A landscape does not move nothing really moves in a landscape but things are there, and I put into the play the things that were there” (129). It is possible to read Stein’s landscape as a theory against emotional turmoil, against difference and friction, but it is also possible that she is making something of the theater’s unease, producing a theatricality that shows us that we, too, are “just there,” present and participating in the making of a field for visual accumulation. In this sense the landscape, rather than flattening the world is a terrain of the all-at-once.

I could also talk about the too much of obsessions, the things that hold me, or that I refuse to put down. Gertrude Stein and this one essay are some of those things for me. There is enough to stay with Stein for years, to stay with this one essay, which is largely what I have done. “Plays” is something that I have often turned back to, something that I have used again and again to tie the string of one thought to another. It has captured me, I think, because it captures something of the consequence of too much, the effect of encounter with the world’s excessiveness, with how systems unfold beyond their promise and potential, beyond their means and how we might capture that. Birds swim flat against the sky, bodies snake through a capital city, a balloon floats far from home.   

Stein claims that Four Saints in Three Acts “did almost what I wanted, it made a landscape and the movement in it was like a movement in and out with which anybody looking on can keep in time” (“Plays,” 131). Her writing is charged with an all-at-once that becomes real on stage. Theatricality allows us to witness and participate in the process by which ideas become real; it troubles the seams of performativity. As Erika Fischer-Lichte suggests, a particular performance “turns out to be a field of experimentation where we can test our capacity for and the possibilities of constructing reality.”[5] Performance is an artform but also is the way a world can be, is, made real. Fischer-Lichte argues that theatricality focuses the attention of the audience on “the very process of construction and the conditions underlying it” (104). It turns our attention to reality as something that is made, constituted through its enactment. In a landscape, we see time as something constructed and also critiqued by its performance.

Thinking this process into time, thinking through how performance interrupts time, Rebecca Schneider writes:

To trouble linear temporality – to suggest that time may be touched, crossed, visited or revisited, that time is transitive and flexible, that time may recur in time, that time is not one – never only one – is to court the ancient (and tired) Western anxiety over ideality and originality. The threat of theatricality is still the threat of the imposter status of the copy, the double, the mimetic, the second, the surrogate, the feminine, or the queer.[6]

And this is, I argue, what Stein’s landscapes help us to enact. They solve one anxiety by evoking another. The landscape touches and crosses, visits and revisits time. There is no difficulty of feeling—no sense of “the emotion of the person looking on at the play being behind or ahead of the play” (Stein, “Plays,” 122)—because everything is brought into this moment, this landscape, all at once in this visual field. This changes the rhythm of effect: what gets caught in the landscape no longer unfolds across time in expected ways, no longer produces consequences in the same manner.

I am interested in how there is too much world, how that too much gets told, comes into relation, into friction, into story, by who in what metaphors and why. What structures the feelings of being in relation, and how knowledge gets named and then organized and then called a kind of capture. How capture organizes, how it distorts, polishes, plays with and plays against. How it amplifies, harms, harnesses and helps. How it turns something into information, into a truth as it catches and circulates some piece of the world. How that truth bends. I play with stock footage. I think about images that intertwine the social and historical into something abstracted and aestheticized, into a landscape. I collect tactics that hold tension in unintended ways, that suspend an idea in a way that might also fall apart. Should fall apart. I think about how images circulate, what those circulations make real. I think about our collapsing knowledge systems, about data extractions and machine generations, about clichés and ways of organizing, reorganizing, and un-organizing the world.

The landscape makes performance into an image, a site where things are happening all at once, overlapping. The social and historical intertwine, become the action abstracted and aestheticized, become something separate and together. It is a space for indeterminacy, for friction, which are ways of talking about a space between the intended and the actual, the world that gets lived in. I have always liked things that were too much, in part for their grandeur and in part because they evade legibility. Or because these moments are moments that are too legible, bring too much into clarity, pull too much into a certain field of vision: because they make a landscape. Katherine McKittrick, in Dear Science and Other Stories, writes that “Discipline is empire.”[7] Discipline is a kind of containment, a mode of capture that organizes, that outlines systems of domination, empire. Empire is grand and all encompassing, opulent and expansive. Empire is brutal and destructive. It is all of this; it brings us back to Tsing, to a strategic universal that generates a friction in a moment of a temporary unity. Empire is superabundance, is all at once, is too much. It is capture and control, it is a temporary unity that makes a landscape that seems to “bend what is true.” The exuberance of too much slips across possibility and consequence, moves away from our ability to control either.

This essay is, at its core, about the feeling of being complicit in a superabundance we cannot control. Control, it is clear, is important to Stein. Her critique of theater centers on the lack of control a person feels in face of a performance of others’ emotions. And so, what does it mean to be complicit in that which we cannot control? How do we find the play in that, how do we mark the ridiculousness of things that seem to bend what is true? Stein’s aviation expert says one thing, and she contends another: what are we to make of it? Of the fact that she is very obviously wrong: the birds do not hang, and very obviously right: this is what they appear to be doing.

Bending what is true is exactly what so much art has always done. It is the point of the landscape, this temporary reconfiguration that is really real and really not (the theater). The all-at-once, its excesses, always already include an extractive urge, an impulse to move the uncontained overabundance into something controllable, exchangeable, into a countable abundance. To discipline the excessive, make it into enough. All at once the lines of operation become clear, the systems that thread out. When legibility returns, it is possible to see what gets cut, organized, shaped into a knowable piece. It becomes clear how the parts of the whole come together, come apart.

The magpies that hang in the sky, an overly long queue, a ship in a canal, a balloon in the sky, stock footage dancing: I think it matters that these images are slightly ridiculous. Because some of what I find most important in the world’s all-at-once, its too much, is how in demonstrating the failure of our systems, any systems, to properly or entirely hold anything at all, they might make us laugh. We see this because “[i]n the historical particularity of global connections, domination and discipline come into their own, but not always in the forms laid out by their proponents.”[8] And so perhaps we can come dangerously close to an argument for the contingency of all truth, all knowledge. But really, this is not that. This is an argument for play and the playful, for the ridiculousness that arrives in an instant that contains more than it should.